The Scope of American Linguistics: Papers of the First Golden Anniversary Symposium of the Linguistic Society of America, held at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, on July 24 and 25, 1974 [Reprint 2015 ed.] 9783110857610, 9783110133431

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THE SCOPE OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS Papers of The First Golden Anniversary Symposium of the Linguistic Society of America, Held at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, on July 24 and 25, 1974 Edited by ROBERT AUSTERLITZ

LISSE

THE PETER DE RIDDER PRESS 1975

© Copyright reserved No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the author.

Printed in Belgium by NICI, Ghent

CONTENTS

EINAR

HAUGEN

Introductory Remarks: The First Golden Anniversary Symposium

5

K E N N E T H L. P I K E

On Describing Languages

9

W . P. L E H M A N N

The Challenge of History RAIMO

41

ANTTILA

Comments on K. L. Pike's and W. P. Lehmann's Papers . . .

59

C H A R L E S A. F E R G U S O N

Applications of Linguistics WILLIAM

63

LABOV

Empirical Foundations of Linguistic Theory

77

C H A R L E S J. F I L L M O R E

The Future of Semantics NOAM

135

CHOMSKY

Questions of Form and Interpretation BARBARA HALL

159

PARTEE

Comments on C. J. Fillmore's and N. Chomsky's Papers Editor's Statement

. .

197 210

I N T R O D U C T O R Y REMARKS: THE FIRST G O L D E N A N N I V E R S A R Y SYMPOSIUM EINAR HAUGEN

Friends, colleagues, ladies and gentlemen: My role in this meeting is purely honorific, and I shall make it as painless as possible. I am here as chairman of a Committee on the Golden Anniversary of the Linguistic Society of America, which was appointed in 1971 by Charles A. Ferguson, then president of the Society. Anniversaries are purely arbitrary gateposts that we set up on our way, and should properly be presided over by the Roman god of entrances, Janus, with his two faces. One face looks back to the past, asking what the road was like that we as linguists and a linguistic society have traversed; the other face looks forward to the future, asking where we are going and what the goals of our society should be. Only by looking both forward and backward can we tell where we are, and perhaps whether we are where we ought to be. In any such rite de passage we must distinguish clearly between the Linguistic Society as a body of scholars and Linguistics as a body of scholarship. Linguistics in America did not begin in 1924, and it would not end if the Linguistic Society should disband tomorrow. Young people are understandably impatient with the mechanics of organization, and for such impatience there is no cure but time and experience. We have set aside just one evening for the Society itself, probably December 27, when past and present secretaries will reminisce as informally as possible about the problems and pleasures involved in keeping this society going over the past fifty years. As everyone knows, presidents come and go, but the secretary-treasurer is the kingpin around whom everything turns. Most of the plans made for the Golden Anniversary, however, go beyond the Society itself to the field for which it was organized. We want the occasion to be not merely reminiscent or self-congratulatory, but also a probe in depth of the state of American linguistics and a boost to its onward progress. As the program in your hands indicates, we have

6

EINAR HAUGEN

planned three scientific symposia. Please do not imagine that these are just so many arbitrary occasions. They are a closely interlocking set of explorations, from which we may hopefully gain enlightenment as well as inspiration. The tripartite organization permits a kind of triangulation, in which each symposium zeroes in one one aspect of American linguistics. Our first symposium, here in Amherst, looks at the scope of American linguistic theorizing, from structuralism to transformationalism to sociolinguistics. Our second symposium, under the chairmanship of Wallace Chafe, will be held in Berkeley on November 8 and 9, focussing on that inexhaustible pool of linguistic data which is unique to America, the languages of our aboriginal population of Indians and Eskimos. Our third symposium, chaired by Henry Hoenigswald, will be held on December 28, at New York, and deal with "the European background of American Linguistics". This is just a way of saying that it will consider American linguistics in its wider context as part of the western tradition in linguistic science, from Panini to the present. In the interaction of Europeans and Americans within a common scientific enterprise it would be hard to say which is background and which is foreground. In designing these symposia within the general theme of "American Linguistics - Past, Present, and Future" each chairman has had a free hand in the selection of participants, giving us a remarkable representation from the active scholars of our time. But we also look forward to the contributions of the audience, by your presence as well as your contribution, and beyond that to the publications that we expect will result, as a tribute to the Linguistic Society of America and a part of its golden harvest. The President of the Society has received a letter of congratulations which I feel is worthy of bringing to all of you as a tribute to the last fifty years of the Linguistic Society of America:

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS

7

Instituto de Idiomas Yázici Centro de Lingüística Aplicada (Founded March 3, 1966) Diretoria Sao Paulo, June 29 1974 Dr. Morris Halle President The Linguistic Society of America Department of Linguistics Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139 U.S.A. Dear Dr. Halle: May we, on behalf of this Center's staff, extend our most cordial greetings to you as well as to all of LSA's Officers, Committee Members, Regular and Life Members on the auspicious occasion of the Golden Anniversary of an organization which, besides rendering outstanding services to its membership throughout a half-century, has proven to be inspirational to the dissemination and progress of the language sciences beyond the frontiers of the United States. The Linguistic Society of America, among its manifold achievements, has helped universalize linguistic thought. Congratulations. Sincerely yours, [signed] Prof. Dr. Francisco Gomes de Matos Director Centro de Lingüística Aplicada Finally, it remains only to present to you the chairman of the first symposium, Robert Austerlitz, professor of Linguistics and Uralic Studies at Columbia University. Though his specialty is Uralic, he speaks virtually any language and always with a special twist of wit and good humor.

ON D E S C R I B I N G L A N G U A G E S KENNETH L. PIKE

ABSTRACT First are listed some developments of the past decade of special interest to this author. For practical phonetics, the contrastive status of fronting of the root of the tongue; for classical phonemeics, the postulation of phoneme of process ('downstep') to accompany phonemes of item ('segments') and of relation ('tone'), in a theory of particle, wave, and field; for classical morphology, the semantics of a system for handling overlapping blocks of formatives, rather than classical morphemes, where no simple segmentation is elegant (but where historical reconstruction of the shape of the blocks seems possible, even when phonological relation is obscured). For any one perspective, how have criteria changed over time, to convince one that he is right: historical, structural, heuristic, generative? Next, some items currently under development in tagmemic theory are mentioned. The grammatical hierarchy is divided into pairs of form-meaning composites. A tagmeme on any level is seen as an intersection of function and filler, with form (arrangement) and meaning (situation) leading to slot, class, role ('case') and category. These structures comprise the nodes of a grammatical tree. The crisscrossing of rule and class is shown for the sentence nucleus. Then is given a report of search for grammatical structure above the sentence by means of experimental syntax - the deformation and re-formation of stories, paragraphs, and sentences. Finally, in respect to the near future, mention is made not only of describing languages by mathematics, but also of describing mathematics by linguistics, via tagmemics. This leads to the use of the relation between mathematics and physics as an analogue of various approaches to linguistic description, and to particularization versus generalization. The four-cell notation for the grammatical tagmeme is extended to the phonological one, and to a proposed semantic tagmeme, in a single total design. And non-verbal behavior is shown as having language-like characteristics of wave segments and smearing - showing that non-verbal and verbal descriptions must be theoretically integrated.

On the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Linguistic Society of America, it is a privilege which I value highly to be able to acknowledge my personal indebtedness to the founders of the Society. Three of them - Leonard Bloomfield, Edward Sapir, and Charles Fries taught me, encouraged me, and demonstrated a pattern of character of gentleness and human dignity which I have long sought to emulate but

10

KENNETH L. PIKE

have never equalled. In this paper, however, I do not attempt to relive those days. Rather, I mention a few items from the recent past in relation to my own further past; something of the 'now' (as I see it through my own bias and my own colored glasses); and certain aspects of 'unfinished business' urging some of us onward, just as the challenges in those early days led our predecessors to send out a call for the founding of the Society.

I. THE NEAR PAST

A. Developments in Practical Phonetics From 1935 to 1948 I concentrated the majority of my attention on Phonetics, Phonemics, Tone, and Intonation, in relation to a heuristic for the analysis of the world's languages. In phonetics, for example, I attempted to exhaust the kinds of sounds which the human voice could make (omitting whistles and trills which my techniques did not handle). What, in my personal view, have been the most important developments since then ? Probably the most important has been the deeper understanding of the independence, as a separate but simultaneous parameter, of movement in the throat as over against movement in the mouth. This has given a richness to practical phonetics, and an insight into historical development, beyond that of the era in which I began. In Africa, I was startled to discover, in listening to a Twi speaker, that underneath his jaw I could see the flesh 'puff out' as he pushed the root of his tongue front, giving a 'hollow' sound to his vowels. I had described such matters in my exercises (1947:21b-22), but had not before seen them as setting up contrastive systems of sounds, phonemically relevant. And it was exciting to learn from Dr. Stewart that he for a long time had known of this fact, and had discussed it with others, but had not put his material in print. Both of us, then, published on different phases of the topic (Stewart 1967, Pike 1967b), while Ladefoged indicates (1964:40) that Henry Sweet by 1906 may have known about this phenomenon. Knowledge of these articles spread to scholars in Viet Nam, who found them explaining more clearly than anything else some of their long-time problems in 'register', and leading to help in historical reconstruction (see especially Gregerson 1973, Lee 1974). But the most interesting to me was the implication of phonological inertia: The setting of the throat

ON DESCRIBING LANGUAGES

11

in a particular position could be continued for a span, independently of mouth position, but could control the choice of alternative (throataffected) vowels, leading to vowel harmony in the affixes. The effectiveness of the control could not be specified as insightfully in terms of any theory which dealt only with phones (or small segments of sound); it required a hierarchy of phonetic types beyond the level of phone, and even beyond that of the syllable. Nor could this be handled strictly in grammatical terms, since - although often the borders coincided with grammatical or lexical words - occasionally (Stewart 1967:187, 190) there were exceptions within these harmony spans which emphasized again that phonological hierarchy could not be equated with grammatical hierarchy. Some time later, in Nepal, I made a related discovery. There, the traditional statements of 'clear' versus 'breathy' vowels was paralleled, in general, by a difference in the height of the larynx. Clear vowels had a higher larynx than the breathy ones. (Cf. Hari 128-29, and Hari, Taylor, and Pike 94, in Hale and Pike 1970.) When the larynx was lowered, pitch was often conditioned to a lower set; and breathiness - especially in isolation - often accompanied it. Thus there was a phonetic package which included pitch, occasional breathy quality, and perhaps other characteristics. This suggested the hypothesis that any one of these could be seized upon by one particular language or subfamily, to develop in its own direction.

B. A Phoneme of Process Similarly, during this same decade there seems to me to have been one major development in the theory of classical phonemics. When I was leaving for a trip to West Africa, in 1965, Gleason pointed out to me the historical source of the 'downstep' tone, via the loss of a historical low tone. Given two morphemes of equal high tone, the placing between them of a tone of phonemic low height brought about the conditioned lowering of the second high. It still retained its phonemic high lexically, insofar as its contrastive relations to other lexical elements of low pitch were concerned. When, furthermore, other lexical high-pitched syllables followed that third syllable, they would pick up the phonetic level of the phonemic high (now phonetic mid) just preceding them - and the same lowering process could recur several times to lead to a down drift. If, however, the first low tone was lost, due to some kind of process,

12

KENNETH L. PIKE

the mid character of the original following high was retained - but there would now be a phonemic contrast between an original high-high sequence which was not intercepted by an old low, and a high-high (now high-mid) sequence which formally had been interrupted by a low. Thus the curious situation arose of a morpheme with a constant systemically-high pitch which under some circumstances was necessarily lower than under other circumstances, but without any conditioning lowering characteristics currently present in the environment. Almost a century earlier, Christaller ([1875] 1964) had known about and published alphabets taking advantage of this kind of understanding, but it was new to me at the time; work of John Stewart (n.d.) was very helpful to me in understanding the situation further. But the most startling fact, in my view, was that we now needed to set up a different kind of phoneme from that which was easily seen in the literature: We already had segments such as /s/ or /o/ which could be recognized more or less in isolation, statically, apart from any environment. We also had elements such as high pitch or low pitch which could be recognized and described only relative to each other in a particular slot in a sequential system; these we could call relational. But now, with the downstep, we had a clear signal of phonological contrast which tied into semantic contrast, but which could be handled neither as an isolatable static unit, nor as a relational one in any one slot. It could be discovered only in reference to its syntagmatic relations. It appeared, therefore, that this sequential characteristic, which depressed a whole system, rather than adding a new pitch or level in the morpheme list as such, needed to be called some kind of process; we had a phoneme of process to add to phonemes of item and relation. (See Pike 1967c.) (If, by chance, anyone should wonder why I continued to be interested in phonemics, in the decade of the sixties when the classical phoneme was so frequently rejected from linguistic theory, I would reply that I was unable to accept any underlying - even though not articulated - axiom which might imply that the sharing of a particular rule by two systems implies the necessary collapse of the contrast between the two systems. A bat is not a bird merely because both utilize rules of aerodynamics; nor does a rule applying both to phonemes and to morpheme alternates necessarily make allomorphic phonemic components into nonphonemic phones. To overplay a generalization is to lose insight into pattern - and man is a pattern-recognizing creature, not merely a rule-governed one. The capturing of patterns is fully as important as the capturing of generalizations across patterns - if we wish to understand natural

ON DESCRIBING LANGUAGES

13

language as people use it. And for evidence that, sometimes at least, it was in fact the phonetic level which was basically lost, rather than the phonemic one, see Eunice Pike 1970, reviewing Postal's Aspects.)

C. On Perspective of Particle, Wave, and Field

But the significance of this view of phonemics was far greater than a mere extension of phonemic theory. It fitted into a deeper axiom which I had adopted long before - that linguistic theory must leave room for the observer, such that no statement in tagmemic theory was eventually divorced from an observer component; and that specifically the observer had his choice of viewing any unit from the three perspectives of particle, wave, and field. (Or that any element could be viewed as if it were static, or as if it were a flowing dynamic element with beginning, mid, and end points; or as if it were a point in a network of relations.) Now the decadesold perplexity as to why there should be differences between segmental phonemes and suprasegmental ones became far less obscure. The highlevel generalization of the simultaneous static-dynamic-relational analysis of behavior in general was supported by such low-level elements as these. A single segment, furthermore, could be viewed as a particle, even though it had long been known that it could also be treated in terms of onglide, center, and offglide. Similarly, it had been known for centuries that a phonetic chart according to points and kinds of articulation could be very useful - even although a phonetic chart was rejected from Bloomfieldian theory (1933:129) as "nevertheless irrelevant to the structure of the language". I myself, however, had been quite unsatisfied with a theory which relied so heavily on contrastive features of a system, without giving to the total structural, systemic intersection of these features an explicit place in the theory. No theory, therefore, struck me as satisfactory which treated a phonetic chart as merely a heuristic device. On the one hand, when a theory - like stratificational grammar treated relationships as basic, I was delighted; but on the other hand I could not go along with it when it explicitly rejected from its theory the concept of unit as no more than a dimensionless point in such a network or graph. For example, in the most recent published work of Lamb, he says: "I have completely characterized that morpheme [dog] in terms of connections which it has to other locations, conceptual, grammatical and expression" (1974:196); and this "is just a formal working out... of

14

KENNETH L. PIKE

what Hjelmslev was saying ... when he stated that a totality does not consist of things but of relationships" (198). Similarly, I was unhappy with any theory which did not make explicit in its assumptions and axioms the difference between the margin and the nucleus of a unit (as in a consonant versus a vowel of a syllable), or which failed to treat such differences in structure as relevant to a wave or dynamic view of theory as such. It is not surprising, therefore, that in 1960 I wanted to check to see if in grammar there might be an analogue of a phonetic chart. And in the next decade there appeared numerous articles developing this concept (e.g. Pike 1962,1963,1964,1965 and others by various authors). Similarly, by 1967a I was trying to extend the theory to show that the wave approach must be applied to grammar as well as to phonology. Here, again, my African experience pushed me to this expedient. The sequence of two obvious clauses, from obviously similar clause sources, developed such that one of them was semantically subservient to the other; and the subordinate one had begun to lose much of its freedom: verbs losing affixes, losing the potential for modifying tagmemes, and developing special tone or special semantics. Just as 'Hope you enjoy it' could fuse to /JinjoHt/, so also two clauses fused into a single highlevel grammatical unit. If the Bloomfieldian approach were treated as a static (or particle) view, then it seemed clear that we needed a dimensional (or field) view, to obtain the relationships and networks needed; and we simultaneously needed a dynamic (or process or wave) view to handle the kind of clausal fusions which were now appearing. At the same time, the concept of unit itself, within this larger frame of theoretical relevance, had to be re-studied in reference to much larger units. It was clear, for example, that there was a single entity involved some kind of coherence or unity or total set of expectancies aroused from the beginning and completed in the end - in such an element as the following: There was an old lady from Clyde, Who ate some green apples and died. The apples fermented, Inside the lamented, And made cider inside 'er insides. [That is, /sa l dr ins ¿¡Mr insi'dz]

(Author unknown)

The limerick was obviously a unit, with complexity. Phonology was

ON DESCRIBING LANGUAGES

15

involved in its rhyme; grammar was involved in the choice of adjective class modifying the noun in the first line; and there was a semantic structure in the sequence of the expectancies of the general relationships of the whole. Astonishing complexity in the relationships of lexicon to phonology and to grammar can appear in a pun: Worse than raining cats and dogs is hailing taxis. Here (cf. Pike 1964a: 131), worse than promises a comparison; is promises that the balance of comparison is to occur on either side of it; the grammatical ending -ing suggests that here is the place of comparison, because of its repetitions and apparent balance. But the balance turns out to be false, forcing a grammatical pun: The second -ing takes an object, taxis. The hearer, searching for the comparison, now glances back to the first half of the pun and treats raining as if the -ing there were there the same, and hence cats and dogs becomes object, with cats and dogs falling from the sky like rain. Once this is done, however, the verb rain forces one to look forward for a member of the lexical set in which the weather is relevant, and finds it through the lexical pun involving hail meaning 'frozen rain'. At this point, a search for semantic balance again flashes back, forcing one to sense that if cats and dogs are falling from the sky by one kind of weather, then taxis must also be falling from the sky. Such complexity cannot in the long run easily be handled by either a simple particle or a wave or a field view; it requires an intricate relation of all three. This, in turn, led us to the study of axioms which might leave room for such development.

D. The Contribution from Study of Further Languages Why should we search out undescribed languages to study them? There is, of course, a 'museum' reason - that we ought to have some understanding of different cultures just because they are there. There is also the wish to check on the presence of universals or putative universals. There is a further reason which is not appreciated, in my opinion, by the current linguistic climate: We should be interested in the theory of particularization as well as generalization. If we wish to understand human nature, it is by no means sufficient that we understand that which is common to every man. We need to understand, somehow, why there are differences among man, and the limits to these differences.

16

KENNETH L. PIKE

Yet even the combination of these two, the need for the general and for the particular, are not sufficient to explain one crucial reason why I feel strongly the need of studying other languages. Specifically, this can be seen at the start of Pascal's triangle. If, in Fig. 1, we have the first rows 1 1 1

1 2

1

Fig. 1

we are not able to be sure what the extension of the structure (or rule or pattern) will certainly be. One cannot begin to see, with certainty, the driving principle or pattern or rule until one has a more complicated or more developed instance of that rule. One might have guessed Fig. 2 1 1

1

1

1 1 1

2

2 1 2 3 2 1 2 3 3 2 1 3 4 3 2 1 Fig. 2

instead of Fig. 3. 1 1 1 1 3 1 4 1 5

1 2

1 3

1 6 4 1 10 10 5 1 Fig. 3

I have a strong conviction that one cannot expect to understand a principle with assurance, even when it is a universal, unless one first sees it in a language where it is highly developed. One of the most illuminating instances of this kind faced me in New Guinea. I was attempting to analyze in terms of morpheme segments a certain part of the paradigm of the Fore verb. But the result was highly

ON DESCRIBING LANGUAGES

17

unsatisfactory, with heavy overlapping allomorphs, and my colleague, Graham Scott, was very unsatisfied with any such morphemic segmentation. Eventually, therefore, I abandoned a classical morphemic segmentation in favor of a field-structure representation. In it, certain phonological components - which I called formatives - were not classical morphemes at all, but were phonological sources reoccurring ar various places in a matrix whose dimensions were number and person. The intersection of blocks of these different formatives within the matrix gave an unambiguous signal for understanding the semantic components. Note, in Fig. 4, for example, the Fore prefix complexes for object:

1st 2nd 3rd

singular na ka a

dual tasi tisi isi

plural ta ti i

Fig. 4

The hyphen si seems clearly a dual morpheme, but it is not easy to determine other elements. When, however, the rows and columns are transposed and permuted, one gets Fig. 5.

singular plural dual

1st na ta tasi

2nd ka ti tisi

3rd a i isi

Fig. 5

Now we see that n, by itself, signals both first person and singular; k signals second person and singular. But a, in addition, signals the presence of either singular or first person. The t implies that the meaning is not singular and not third person, but is either plural or dual, plus either first or second; whereas i implies that the meaning is neither first nor singular, but is either second or third, as well as plural or dual. When one tries to define these in terms of morphemes, the result becomes awkward (see Pike 1963:5-6). When, however, the formative blocks are marked, the significant pattern of intersections is visible, as in Fig. 6. The Fore subject suffixes are even more interesting. Without emphatic suffix they become as in Fig. 7.

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KENNETH L. PIKE

1st

2nd

n

#

k

—

—

singular

3rd

plural

si

dual

Fig. 6

singular plural dual

1st uw un us

2nd aan aaw aas

3rd ay aaw aas

Fig. 7

With emphatic suffix, they are seen in Fig. 8.

singular plural dual

1st o# ompe ome

2nd aampe aa# aame

3rd ami ~ i # aa# aame

Fig. 8

When these two sets are shown as conflated blocks, they turn out as in Fig. 9, where the two sets have the same matrix alignment of formative blocks, but with differences of phonological content - so that in the block for first person plus either singular or plural or dual one finds /u/ in the first matrix, but /o/ in the second. So that the block as a component of matrix pattern is labelled as /u ~ of.

ON DESCRIBING LANGUAGES 1st

2nd

19

3rd

Fig. 9

Now if this were an isolated instance, one might assume that it was completely accidental - merely 'irregular'. Once, however, one learns that this kind of specific structure may be found over scores of languages of the area, even when the formatives have radically different phonology, one must conclude that it is the point in a pattern of formatives which is doing the signalling - the pattern of these formatives in their intersection - rather than additive elements of a classical morpheme type. The consequences are very great. (1) It tells us that we must supplement particle analysis of a string with a field analysis. (2) It implies that there may be a possibility of historical reconstruction of patterns of formative blocks, even when the phonology is obscure; and that this might be done as rigorously as classical reconstructions of morpheme phonological shapes. (See, for example, Seiler's comment about Greek, referred to in my comparable discussion of German, 1965:208, fn.) For the moment, however, my point is quite simple: that such kinds of situations are related to the structure of English am, are, is, or to this, those, that, these, thy, thine, thus, therefore; but that the development of theory for the understanding of the English examples from such a small amount of material is extremely difficult - difficult, that is, to get a theoretical statement which will be as applicable over a wide range of language as is the technique for the Fore, which has been applied to widespread instances in North America and Africa as well as to the source in the South Pacific.

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KENNETH L. PIKE

E. Axioms and Theory In studying these and other matters, how does one know that one is right ? It seems to me that the answer to this question has differed from scholar to scholar. As I see it, the scholars of the nineteenth century felt that they were right if and only if they could explain how an item got that way; a description of the historical process by which an element had developed, to them defined an understanding of that item. At the turn of the century, it seems to me, the answer might have been that we understand, and know that we are right, if we can see how parts of a whole fit together in some kind of structure. By the 1940's, on the other hand, the answer seems to have been that we know we are right only if we can show in retrospect that we might have arrived at the given answer by some kind of stated testing of heuristic procedure by which we might have found out the data. In fact, however, one arrives at the answer by a much more catch-as-catch-can method, and the heuristic for proving that one was right was rather an 'as-if-we-might-have-done-it' procedure, rather than an actual procedure. In the current era, as I see it from a distance, many of my colleagues seem to feel they are right if and only if they can express their conclusions in terms of rules - which become the ultimate epistemological basis of reality. These rules seem to me to be related to a logical positivistic basis of formalism with axioms plus a mechanical interpretive quasimathematical process, and a predictiveness which it matches against certain chosen end results. It seems to me that we should insist that - as is well known to epistemologists - the axioms themselves are not up for proof; they are accepted as given, and determine the limits of all theorems growing out of them. As one mathematician, Arthur Bernhardt, said to me, "Our basic creativity is seen in that which we choose to believe." Once the initial choice of axioms is made, we are simultaneously given freedom by them to develop theorems and insights; and at the same time we are trapped within them so that we are blind to anything outside of their aegis, no matter how valid or true or relevant these other elements may be. I'm reminded of what someone - 1 do not know who - told us: When a sailor on a sinking ship was shouting loudly, 'Woman the lifeboats, woman the lifeboats!', another sailor stepped up to him and whispered in his ear, 'We don't holler, ' Woman the lifeboats!' We're supposed to shout, 'Man the lifeboats!' To which the first sailor replied, 'Listen, buster, you fill your lifeboats, and I'll fill mine!'

ON DESCRIBING LANGUAGES

21

I am quite unsatisfied with generalizations which cover structures of language only, and fail to let me look out on the world and see that language is just one component of our biological output, where our enormous capacity is conditioned not merely by ingrained language components, but by ingrained capacities to view the world from different perspectives.

n.

NOW

Turning from the recent past to the present:

A. Paired Levels of the Grammatical Hierarchy As Form-Meaning Composites One of the axioms upon which I build is that the composite relations of form and meaning should be kept simultaneously under attention. Lexically this relates, historically, to the phrase 'the arbitrariness of the sign'. Recently we have found it very profitable to apply the formmeaning concept to specific hierarchical levels. One of them has as its semantic function the naming of items (or their grouping or handling as terms); another says something about terms (in the form of propositions or performative actions in language). This leads to a major theoretical difference between noun phrase and verb phrase, on the one hand, and clause and sentence on the other. Further, however, the levels in English come in pairs, such that there can be a minimum level of that pair, and an expanded one, each with the same kind of form-meaning function: A noun like John and a phrase like the big boy whom I used to know are, semantically, terms; and a single independent clause such as John came home yesterday, and a sentence such as Probably John came home yesterday and Bill stayed at the office in order to get their tasks done are semantically propositions. There are further levels, as form-meaning composites, where the meaning involves a theme and its development, or social interaction, or lexical packaging. For these pairs, see Fig. 10 (from Pike and Pike, 1974a: 3.2).

22

KENNETH L. PIKE

MEANING

MINIMUM UNIT

EXPANDED UNIT

Social Interaction

Exchange

Conversation

Theme-Development

Paragraph/Sentence Cluster

Monologue

Proposition

Clause

Sentence

Term

Word

Phrase

Lexical Package

Morpheme

Morpheme Cluster

Fig. 10. Chart of Paired Grammatical Levels.

B. Skewing of Slot and Role in the Four-Cell Tagmeme It is well known that for twenty years I have been interested in grammar in relation to slot, and the class filling the slot. It is less well known that, in the same material (1954 :§§ 7.3, 7.321, 7.43, 7.6), I was interested in the fact that the subjectness of a slot was not enough to characterize a tagmeme adequately - but that I set up contrastive tagmemes of subject-as-actor in contrast to subject-as-undergoer (then called subjectas-goal). This contrastive use of role (now most often called case) as differentiating tagmemes I combined into matrix charts by 1964b. Currently, however, we have gone substantially beyond this kind of representation on the clause level, and have shown that similar differences are necessary to handle phenomena of quite different types, on higher levels of the hierarchy. We expect this to be relevant, for example, for contrastive paragraph types. Here I give Fig. 11 (from Pike and Pike, 1974a: 4.1) an array to show the tagmeme as the intersection of rows indicating form and meaning with columns of function and filler (and cf. Becker 1967:6). Then in Fig. 12 (from Pike and Pike 1974a: 4.3) we have rows to show that a sentence nucleus may have a role which is statement, or question, or command; and columns to show that the filler can be declarative in form, or interrogative, or imperative. The norm of the relation is for

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Function

Filler

Form Organizational Feature (Arrangement)

A

B

Meaning Situational Feature (General Situation)

B

Slot

Class (or classes) D

Role

Category (or categories)

Fig. 11

statement role with declarative form, or question role with interrogative form, or command role with imperative form. These are seen as the diagonal in Fig. 12. Class of Sentence Nucleus Declarative Interrogative Imperative Clause Clause Clause Role of Sentence Nucleus : Statement Question Command Fig. 12

Yet each of the possibilities can be filled in. Illustrations are given below, with numbers corresponding to the numbers in the cells. (Differences in phonology are implied by punctuation, but otherwise are not specifically indicated. There is some ambiguity; we are not attempting to specify here how this is to be shown.) 1. 2. 3.

Abe got into my watermelon patch yesterday. (Statement role with declarative class; norm) Don't you realize you're trespassing! (Statement role with interrogative class) (Go right ahead,) take just as mdny as you like; (so you can go to jail). (Statement role with imperative class)

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You don't mean to say Abe entered your melon patch!? (Question role with indicative class) Why did Abe get into the melon patch ? (Question role with interrogative class; norm) Get out of my 6wn melon patch ?! (Question role with imperative class) You don't beldng in here! (i.e. Get out!) (Command role with declarative class) How come you are in my watermelon patch! (i.e. Get out!) (Command role with interrogative class) Get out of my watermelon patch! (Command role with imperative class; norm)

Hierarchy, that is, comes in pairs of form-meaning composites, with slot and role interlocking but partially independently variable. From this hierarchical starting point one is able to deduce certain basic definitions of importance to the rest of our descriptive system: The minimum unit initiating a normal conversational exchange of speech (ignoring greetings, for example) is an independent clause which is simultanously a sentence; and the minimum normal reply is a word. The series of detailed postulates by which one goes beyond this to develop the theory is not important here (but postulates are in press which carry the material further; Pike, in Brend, Tagmemics, to appear). One advantage of a grammatical four-cell notation is that a point in a node of a tree (or a point in a network of a relational diagram) can be expanded to include contrastive feature types. Each node is expanded into a natural spectrum, or field, of contrastive features (with the possible addition of further expansion indicating the phonological and semantic elements at the same nodes). The point-node of an ordinary diagram gives a simpler tree - but the price paid for this simplicity is loss of clarity in immediate presentation of some kinds of structure present at such a node. (In an extensive network of a stratificational type one can deduce these features by tracing the netword far enough back along its various paths. The difference is not that the stratificationalist loses the data, but that he does not have it immediately accessible at each node.) Conversely, as we see it, the difficulty with the tagmemic notation is that the data are immediately accessible, but that there is a clutter caused by some redundancy. The choice of one or the other notation will be determined by one's purposes, axioms, and general feeling of esthetics. We have opted for the direct representation of more of the material. This

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has the advantage, from our viewpoint, of allowing us to start our notation immediately, in a heuristic approach to unknown data, with tentative representations of the signals at that point; and various kinds of tentative learning devices can be built upon this material. There is a kind of naturalness to this, we also feel, in that the learner of a new language must somehow be able to operate within the middle of the network, directly, without having to wait to develop the entire network. We feel, also, that this naturalness is somehow related to the speaker's ability to listen immediately to a conversation which is broken (that is which omits certain tagmemes expected in a complete, normal, sentence) and to understand it (provided, that is, that within one of the cells, whether of the phonology, grammar, or semantics, there is a cue). If a necessary cue is missing, then a query must be given to ask for the extra information.

C. Stability via Levels The implications of this development go far beyond the chart. They involve the mathematical stability (first pointed out to me by O'Malley) of our approach through levels. This makes possible a descriptive system with irregularities pushed as low as possible down the hierarchical description, so that the implication of newly-discovered irregularities are held there, without upsetting seriously a formalism which was developed without them. In this sense, generation 'downwards' from large to small units leaves higher levels unaffected by low-level changes. In addition, this makes possible an approach to a rationale for setting priority rankings for the significance of contrastive features of a system, in relation to rule structures associated with that system. (Compare Bee 1973:191-92, 196-98.) Specifically, for example, a rule (or notation) specifying the optionality of a tagmeme on the level of clause should be implemented (as plus or minus presence or absence of a tagmeme) before the internal, lower included mechanism of that tagmeme is allowed to generate to its bitter end. The reason becomes clear when one finds that certain tagmemes may affect some component of a lower level (of an included tagmeme) of whatever tagmeme winds up being its neighbor. If the affected tagmeme is deleted after it has been developed in surface detail, a great amount of work is wasted, whereas the early deletion of that tagmeme would have meant that that lower development need not have taken place. This, in fact, determines part of the specification for the

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ordering of steps in the generation of the English verb phrase, from a tagmemic point of view, in Pike and Pike (1974b).

D. Experimental Syntax A number of us are heavily involved in what I have called experimental syntax. As one goes higher and higher up the hierarchy toward the study of paragraphs and discourse the heuristic problems become greater and greater. It seems to me that any kind of reductionism in which we attempt to analyze the highest layers exclusively as a sum of lower layers will eventually be as humanly impossible as it would be to try to analyze a theory of war exclusively as a sum of nuclear reactions and relations inside of the atom. A biologist may start with a cell, a sociologist with a person, the economist with a nation or culture - or some other unit which he chooses other than movements of electrons and components of atomic nuclei. I am myself looking for ways of getting at higher structures which do not forbid us going down to lower ones, but which do not require us to begin immediately at the classical level of the morpheme nor with tight formalistic rules beginning with a sentence. The term experimental syntax is designed to cover a number of different approaches to this situation. In one of these, we first analyze the grammatical form and grammatical role of a story, with a tree having a four-celled tagmeme notation at the nodes (Pike and Pike 1972, and 1974:2.8-9; for further discourse analysis, see Longacre 1968, 1972). Then we keep the plot invariant while changing the authors; then we do the converse, retaining the original slot-and-role outline, while changing the story itself - the plot - completely. Changes of the form have included such elements as telling the story backwards - and studying the requisite changes of lexicon or grammar to re-establish the original meaning; or the typing of the story so that every other sentence is changed in its order, so that the original number 1,2, 3,4, 5, 6 comes out 2,1, 4, 3, 6, 5, etc. It turns out that these optional deformations of the structure lead to obligatory reformations, if the meaning is not to be lost. Words like after and before warn the hearer that the original chronological sequence has been reversed. (So that instead of saying John came home. He ate his supper.; one may say, John ate his supper after he came home, with reversal of the order of the clauses.) We continue to be astonished at the number of kinds of deformation which may be allowed in any one language. It seems to be tied in to

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focus of attention. A crucial characteristic of human nature is our ability to select and group into attention almost anything that we please. This capacity to change focus involves not only the ability to change the order of sentences - with appropriate adjustments as indicated - but the packaging of materials into words or paragraphs or stories at different hierarchical levels. Evelyn Pike suggests, for example, that the difference between a lecture about phonemics, and the name phonemics, is precisely related to this packaging: the newer a new concept may be, the more words it may take for the hearer to understand it. The older the concept becomes, and the more familiar, the more tightly packaged it can be - down through to the level of a single morpheme. There may be, however, selective resistance to deformation. For Sherpa it was pointed out (by Schottelndreyer and Pike, in Pike and Hale 1973:321-60) that after a reversal deformation of the order of every sentence pair, a secondary reversal of sentence pairs (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; 2,1,4,3, 6, 5; 2,4, 1, 6, 3, 5) in the same story 'lost' the informant so that he was unable to reconstruct the original meaning. Secondary deformation met much greater psychological resistance than primary deformation. This implies that one is dealing not only with sentence pairs (where reversal may be in general possible) but that one is dealing also with sentence clusters (or paragraphs) as semantic-grammatical units. There are various other experimental syntax techniques. One of the earliest was by Koen, Becker, and Young (1969), where, given a passage, they excerpted a section and deleted, by retyping, the author's orthographic paragraph boundaries (the indentations), and asked students "to place paragraph markers at the places that seemed right to them". The interjudges' agreement was, to me, astonishing, with a median reliability of .86. They also found that if they replaced each content morpheme (noun root, or verb root, or adjective root) with a nonsense word (using the same nonsense word for each recurrence of the initial morpheme chosen) that here, once more, students in the midst of semantic chaos (where the passage was totally unintelligible as to semantic plot) reach .73 median reliability (with .71 between the normal English and the nonsense versions). This was even more astonishing. It means that there are cues within the function words, or within parallelisms of structure, or within recurrent lexical elements (since a nonsense morpheme could be seen as recurrent, even when its meaning was unknown) which help to signal paragraph breaks; but that some semantic cues between the English and the nonsense versions led to the .86-.71 difference. Here,

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again, experimental syntax shows that there are structures beyond the sentence. Another of my own experiments was as follows: I took a sequence of sentences in the order of their transitivity set, from bitransitive, with subject, object, and indirect object; to transitive, with subject and object, to semitransitive, with subject and indirect object of location or person; to intransitive with subject; to semi-equative, with subject as-item, indirect object-as-scope, and complement-as-characteristic of the subject; and equative, with subject-as-item and complement-as-characteristic of the subject. I then chose a plot, or theme, or situation. Next I arbitrarily told a story in which each successive sentence must be chosen as coming from the next sentence or clause from the transitivity set; and each sentence must contain a certain word (e.g. book) or a pronoun referring to it. I got two surprises: (1) The story sounded quite natural. (2) If I retold the same story using just one clause type (restricting, say, everything to transitive) the naturalness totally disappeared; it seemed very forced indeed. Evidently some kind of discourse structure was demanding variety while restricting naturalness in the choice of the flow of the kinds of these clause types! What these constraints were I did not - and do not - know. I give an example: The 'book' story, with sequence of transitivity clauses : Situation: Bloomfield's book Language is on a shelf in my library. A young scholar who embraces a non-Bloomfieldian theory comes into my office to talk about this and related matters. The event: BT I took Bloomfield's book off the shelf and handed it to the young scholar who had just stepped into my office. T This classical book bothered him. ST It fell to the floor with a thud, from his hand. I The book screamed with indignation and pain (and I did, too). SEq That book seemed important to me. Eq It had been, in fact, colossal in its own way - and is still extant. The 'book' story modified sufficiently to allow it to be told with transitive clauses, exclusively: A young man opened my office door. I saw the young man. He saw the book. He took the book. It bothered him. He dropped it. It hit the floor with a thud. The book scolded him, and I did

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too, because of indignation and pain. I honored that book. It had accomplished a great deal - and has survived the attacks of time. (Notice, especially, the extensive re-working required to give an approximation of the initial two coordinate clauses. The four transitive sentences used are awkward.) In a further experiment, I took multiple-clause sentences, and marked each clause for role; then each sentence was split into a sentence cluster of two or more sentences. But now, with the role meanings kept invariant between the two hierarchical forms, the roles which were easily seen (by conjunction markers, for example) on the lower level were retained in the notation for the constituents of the sentence cluster, even when these roles were not as apparent there. This, in turn, allowed us to document more clearly than before the slot-and-role composition of a sentence cluster (or paragraph) - where now contrastive structures could more easily be seen. Such an instance was Because the party was cancelled she stayed home (taking initial sentence and partial tagmemic analysis from Trail 1973). I re-worked this into the sentence cluster The party was cancelled. She stayed home. (Or, The party was cancelled. In view of that she stayed home) In the initial sentence the first clause role was reason; the second was result. In the re-worked sentence cluster, the first sentence role was (by paraphrase relation and semantic invariance) reason, whereas the second was result. (The addition, in the alternative version, of In view of that made the relation explicit for the cluster, but was not necessary for the definition of its role in the cluster, provided that the hearer knows that the cluster is intended as a paraphrase of the initial sentence - i.e., ignoring ambiguities which might develop in other contexts.) We conclude, therefore, that grammatical role relationships between clauses may be preserved across hierarchical transformation. Substantial delicacy of adjustments may be necessary in such hierarchical transformations. Compare The quicker you return the quicker you can eat., with the transforms You may return at various times, some earlier than others. The earlier times allow you to eat earlier, proportionately. (But it is not a paraphrase to say If you return quickly, you can eat quickly., since two nonparaphrase elements are involved: quickness, as such, should not have been implied, but only degree; and proportionality should have been included, but was not.) Practical applications are beginning to appear from one or more of

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these kinds of theoretical studies. Dennis Godfrey (1974) is taking a paragraph, and having foreign students rewrite it with same content (in general), but with various focus changes. This proves important in teaching them essay writing, since otherwise some of the essays by the same students are not coherent, or do not adequately highlight the appropriate information. Win Horner (1974) is experimenting with a different device to help students in composition. She abstracts paragraphs from the beginning, middle, and end of essays. These are then mixed up, randomly, and students are asked to try to identify which of the three parts of an essay they might have come from. Some turn out to be ambiguous. Others are clearly non-initial, and others non-final. She then tries to identify those cues which have been responsible for the unambiguousness of some of them. She then rephrases these paragraphs, eliminating the cues (or replacing them with the opposite). Next, the materials are resubmitted to a jury, to see if in fact she has been successful in changing their reactions consistently. From her materials it can be seen clearly that an essay, like a clause, may be treated as having margins and nucleus, and can (if we choose), be treated as a wave, not merely as a particle. Other kinds of approaches similarly demonstrate that the same essay may (for other purposes) be treated as a field structure - just as the outline representation of that essay shows it can be treated as a particle structure.

E. Rule Indices in the English Verb Phrase For readers who were pleased in 1957 by Chomsky's simple analysis of the English verb phrase, it might also be interesting to know what tagmemics has done recently with such materials. (For details see Pike and Pike, in Brend 1974:175-204). To the slot cell of the tagmemic notation, we added certain indices which predict, by rule, what will happen across the construction to other tagmemes under given conditions. We wanted to preserve words as units. We did not want to break them up by moving their affixes backwards in the notation to other positions; and we wanted to do this as part of an attempt to preserve a focus upon unit and hierarchy in the description. In order to accomplish this we added, to the controlling tagmemes, indices (as contrastive features of those tagmemes) which represented

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certain multi-level rules which first work from one level of the hierarchy across to tagmemes on that same level, and then down to a lower level of the hierarchy. Most of the rule indices work progressively; one works regressively. We look forward to having upward-working multi-level rules where features of a tagmeme affect a unit of a much higher level in the hierarchy. Perhaps, through this approach, we can take something like Once upon a time and give rules which will tie back into the kind of cues which Horner has been working on to determine paragraphs at the beginning or end of essays - or in this instance - stories.

i n . UNFINISHED BUSINESS

We are also looking for advance, in this decade, in many other directions.

A. On Mathematics Applied to Linguistics Two decades ago I was wishing to bring to bear various kinds of available mathematical technology upon the description of some difficult features of language design. Specifically, at that time I suggested (1955 :§§ 8.441, 9.231) that ('rubber blanket') topology could help describe some features of phonemic patterning with, for example, style changes in whisper or song handled in this way. A decade later I was wishing that we could use a similar topological approach to handle certain kinds of transformations of role structures in relation to grammatical slots, from - say - active to passive. I hope that some of this kind of approach will eventually be formalized. On the other hand, we have had much greater success dealing with the discourse structure of turn-taking, in which Abe, Bill, and Charlie, with one speaking to one, have six states (A-B, B-A, A-C, C-A, B-C, C-B), and where discourse is radically different in accordance with the social axioms which are chosen. The choice of an axiom that allows B to reply to A, plus one that allows A to shift and talk to C, leads to the theorem 'Don't speak until you're spoken to'. Here dozens of different formalizations of the same six end points can be given (Pike 1973, with earlier material by Pike and Lowe 1969, Lowe 1969, and alternate treatment in Poythress 1973, 1974). Only a few of the formalizations are linguistically and socially interesting, but they do, as a whole,

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document the conclusion that some parts of natural language design can be treated by current mathematical devices; and that some of these devices can be useful on much higher levels of structure than the sentence - as for example, by Grimes (1971) in further development of participant orientation (drawing in part on an earlier version of Wise and Lowe 1972). Grimes shows that one can detect surprise points in a narrative, in part, by the degree of complexity of the group-theoretical notation at the point of paragraph change.

B. On Linguistics Applied to the Analysis of Mathematics Another dream of mine for a long time has been the very opposite: that linguistics would be used to describe mathematics. If mathematics is the study of abstract systems, it would appear that the result of a linguistic abstraction would be mathematics; but if linguistics is the study of communication, and if mathematics is a device for communicating relationships, then it is equally clear that mathematics is a variety of linguistics. So I have wanted tagmemic formulas to be brought to bear upon the analysis of mathematical pattern. The first of these articles is in press, by Poythress, in which he gives a tagmemic analysis of x2 + x - 12 = 0 It seems to me that this start should be carried much further, and that the implications are profound. If, for example, the first axiom of any system of logic must be in words, then it follows that underlying all logic is linguistics, since the analysis of the first axiom demands the entire range of linguistic theory and analysis. (This conclusion seems normal to me, since people first talk in language, not in mathematical symbols.)

C. On a View of Mathematician versus Physicist I have been told, both by physicists and by pure mathematicians, that I think more like a physicist than a mathematician. This puzzled me when I heard it, since I am neither mathematician nor physicist - but when both tried to explain to me what they meant it seemed to be illuminating, even though undoubtedly the generalization is a crude one. When I was trying to explain to a theoretical physicist that I was having

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difficulty talking to certain mathematicians about my Cayley diagrams in the description of English pronouns, his reply was (more or less): "You have certain dynamic elements in your definitions, whereas group mathematics is static - we physicists are always fighting with the mathematicians." (His further statement, upon my inquiry, that it was in quantum mechanics that the dynamic and static were simultaneously present in math, left it beyond my reach.) It was later a mathematician, however, who said to me that the pure mathematician may get stimulus from data, but then wishes to leave the data, to deal exclusively with the internal relationships of the points in the system. A physicist, on the other hand (so the mathematician affirmed), constantly returns to his data to revise his mathematical formulations, to match them against reality. However this may be, it seems to me that I understand a wee bit better my relation to the current climate of opinion in relation both to stratificational grammar and to transformational grammar when I remember that Hjelmslev, for example, told me that he had come into linguistics as a logician, attempting to apply logic to linguistics. The mathematician, it seems to me, differs from the experimental physicist, in that the mathematician can leave out of some of his equations certain annoying interferences from - say - cosmic rays, when he wishes to get a simple abstraction; but that the physicist, in attempting to study the degree of disintegration of a sample of carbon 14, cannot rule out by abstract fiat the intruding bombardment by cosmic rays, but must put bricks around his experimental apparatus. Here, then, those of us working with certain kinds of linguistic assumptions prefer to leave complexity in our axioms - or even unresolved ambiguity or conflict between them - if that is the price we must pay for looking at all the data which is facing us at the moment. It is here that I find myself when I discuss linguistic particle, wave, and field, since observationally I am unable to account for certain kinds of data unless I change stance from one of these to another. I am also unable to satisfy myself with any one formula which shows all three at once. Hence there is some redundancy in a description of - say - a list of contrastive sounds, versus the description of those same sounds in terms of their internal wave-like structure, versus their description as mere points in a phonetic matrix. Currently I accept this clash, as the price necessary for me to capture generalizations of different types. I prefer to report the results of the 'experiments' of observing data from these different perspectives, even

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if it leaves some redundancy in the treatment from these different perspectives. I prefer this to a single rigid point of view which then either leaves extremely difficult the detection of some of these results, or leaves them out altogether.

D. Grammar as Wave From this context, it is easy to point out another area of unfinished business: Grammar as wave (Pike 1967) has barely been touched on. It seems to me that much more work is needed on the theoretical basis of nucleus versus margin in relation to wave, of embedding in relation to wave, and of a wave view of historical change which relates one level of grammar to another as a result of such change.

E. Particularization versus Generalization Similarly, it seems to me, no simple approach through ideals of abstraction or generalization, alone, can capture the reality of the particular. One may be interested in mankind, but somehow we must be interested in a particular John Doe in his particular relationships with that society; and we must be interested in particular initial introductions of new words into a language, before they have become generalized in their impact as a sound change of the sound system as a whole. Pure abstraction can capture generalizations; something else is needed for particularization. Becker, in Michigan, is working on this problem at the moment. The particular linguistic and social biography of an individual is obviously involved in the content of any conversation which results. His ability to understand is dependent upon what he knows and what he has heard. But, beyond that, the probability of his saying something of a particular nature is radically affected by his personal experience. It is also affected by his personality structure; tagmemics has long been interested, in principle, in such matters (Pike 1960: § 17.4). But now Bernstein (in Bernstein and Pike 1974) gives preliminary but concrete suggestions as to how such matters might affect a particular dialogue. In the future, we have as unfinished business much more of this kind of psycholinguistic research to be done.

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F. The Phonological Paired-Level Hierarchy and the Four-Cell Tagmeme Earlier (IIA) we gave the grammatical paired hierarchy, and (IIB) mentioned its four-cell tagmemic elements. Tench (1972) has shown that phonology, likewise, may have a paired hierarchy, for example: syllable - stress group phoneme - phoneme cluster And we are working on some of these levels, with a four-cell tagmeme of phonology (Pike in Brend, Tagmemics, in press) as in Fig. 13. (And see, for earlier work on phonological tagmemes, Crawford 1963.) Slot e.g. end position in a poetic line

Class e.g. VC

Role e.g. rhyme

Category e.g. -ove Fig. 13

There, slot might be the place at the end of a poetic line; role, rhyme; class, a VC pattern; category the -ove ending to rhyme dove with love. Much further work needs to be done here, in order to describe other phonological tagmemes, and then to show their relation to (integration or clash with) grammatical constructions. G. The Four-Cell Semantic Tagmeme Work on the semantic tagmeme is even less far advanced. See Fig. 14 for a preliminary suggestion (from Pike, in Brend, Tagmemics, in press). Slot part in whole

Class taxonomic

Role concept

Category a paraphrase set Fig. 14

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Here, as with the grammatical and phonological hierarchies, the slot component implies a relation of part-to-whole, where a tree structure has end points which are not instances of the nodes above them. Class, on the other hand, may be taxonomic, with end points as instances of each upper (successively more inclusive) node. Category is a subset of the meanings of a taxonomic class, seen as members of a paraphrase set; and the role is the concept which is the meaning of that paraphrase set. I am assuming that here semantic elements will eventually be accommodated which give contrast to dictionary elements (boy versus man)', identity to encyclopedic synonyms {John, my son Johnny, he [= John]. Here, too, we expect to accommodate certain kinds of case differences which are too fine-grained, or too lexically-conditioned to be included within our broader emic roles of the grammatical tagmeme. Only when this is done, I suspect, will we find ourselves coming still closer to some of the case grammarians who - we think - are currently giving more attention to certain of these details than we care to treat in our grammatical tagmemes. The three kinds of tagmemes are each manifested by the same data elements of the lexical hierarchy, from morpheme to poem. This integration - suggested by Evelyn Pike - is seen diagrammed in Fig. 15.

It carries with it relationships to stratificationalism - with at least one major difference, in that here the lexical manifestation provides the constantly-present units required by tagmemic theory.

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H. Nonverbal Behavior And time fails me to discuss the relation of tagmemics, in future studies, to nonverbal behavior. For example, I have preliminary evidence (in press), found by using video tape with stop action, that the contrastive features of a significant unit may be dispersed over some movements of a sequence (reminiscent of phonemic cues to one phoneme which are present, by behavioral anticipation or decaying wave action, in neighboring phonemes). But a posed or staged photo or painting can lead the subject or painter to 'concentrate' the contrastive features in a moment of time, in a simultaneous bundle. This can make a pencil sketch seem far more 'real' than a candid photograph. The efficient and observant artist catches the nucleus of the emic motion, not an irrelevant conditioned transition point. (In effect, this is something like choosing to take a sample brief segment of a phoneme at the height - the nucleus - of the phonemic wave, and show it as a face diagram; but the cutting out, for hearing, of a transition point between phonemes on a tape recording, leads to a sound which does not seem natural.) Such studies must be carried much further before we can find, with elegant detail, the patterns, rules, or generalizations which will let us feel more comfortable with the necessary treatment of verbal behavior as a special instance of human purposeful behavior. University of Michigan REFERENCES Becker, Alton L. 1967. A Generative Description of the English Subject Tagmeme. Ph. D. Dissertation, University of Michigan. Bee, Darlene. 1973. Neo-Tagmemics: An Integrated Approach to Linguistic Analysis and Description. Ukarumpa, Papua New Guinea, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Bernstein, Jared, and Kenneth L. Pike. 1974. "The Emic Structure of Individuals in Relation to Dialogue", in Grammars and Descriptions, ed. by Teun A. Van Dijk and Jänos S. Petöfi (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam), in press. Bloomfield, Leonard. 1933. Language. New York: Henry Holt and Co. Brend, Ruth, ed. 1972. Kenneth L. Pike, Selected Writings. The Hague: Mouton. —, ed. 1974. Advances in Tagmemics. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Co. —, ed. In press. Tagmemics. The Hague: Mouton. Crawford, John C. 1963. Totontepec Mixe Phonotagmemics. Summer Institute of Linguistics Publications in Linguistics and Related Fields No. 8. Christaller, Johann G. [1875] 1964. A Grammar of the Asante and Fante Languages Called Tshi. Basel (republished by Gregg Press Incorporated, Ridgewood, New Jersey).

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Godfrey, Dennis. 1974. ["Alternative Paragraph Focus in Essays"]. Manuscript. Gregerson, Kenneth J. "Tongue-Root and Register in Mon-Kmer". A paper presented at the First International Conference on Austroasiatic Linguistics, Jan. 2-6, 1973 Grimes, Joseph. 1971. "Participant Orientation", Philippine Journal of Linguistics 2.2.93-100. Hale, Austin, and Kenneth L. Pike. 1970. Tone Systems of Tibeto-Burman Languages of Nepal, Part I, as Vol. 3 of Occasional Papers of the Wolfenden Society on Tibeto-Burman Linguistics. Urbana: Dept. of Linguistics. Horner, Win. 1974. "An Analysis of Contrastive Features of Beginning and Ending Paragraphs in the Essay". Manuscript. Koen, Frank, Alton Becker, and Richard Young. 1969. "The Psychological Reality of the Paragraph", Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 8.49-53. Ladefoged, Peter. 1964. A Phonetic Study of West African Languages: An AuditoryInstrumental Survey, in West African Language Monographs 1. Cambridge: University Press. Lamb, Sydney M. 1974. "Dialogue with Sydney M. Lamb", in Discussing Language, Herman Parret, ed. Mouton: The Hague. Janua Linguarum, Series Maior, Forthcoming. Langer, Susanne K. 1953. An Introduction to Symbolic Logic. 2nd ed. New York: Dover. Lee, Ernest W. 1974. "Devoicing, Aspiration, and Vowel Displacement in Haroy". A paper presented at the Linguistic Forum, University of Oklahoma, July 1, 1974. Longacre, Robert E. 1968. Philippine Languages: Discourse, Paragraph, and Sentence Structure. Vol. 1. in Summer Institute of Linguistics Publications in Linguistics and Related Fields, No. 21. —, 1972. Hierarchy and Universality of Discourse Constituents in New Guinea Languages: Discussion. Washington, D. C.: Georgetown University Press. Lowe, Ivan. 1969. "An Algebraic Theory of English Pronominal Reference", Semiótica 1.397-421. (And sequel, in press.) Pike, Eunice. 1970. Review of Paul M. Postal, Aspects of Phonological Theory, in Lingua 25.30-46. Pike, Evelyn, and Kenneth L. Pike. 1974. "Rules as Components of Tagmemes in the English Verb Phrase". In Brend, Advances, 1974.175-204. Pike, Kenneth L. 1947. Phonemics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan. —. Vol. 1,1954; Vol. 2, 1955; Vol. 3,1960. Second Edition, 1967. Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior. Preliminary edition, Summer Institute of Linguistics; Second edition, The Hague: Mouton. —. 1962. "Dimensions of Grammatical Constructions", Language 38.221-44. (Also in Brend, 1972.160-85). —. 1963. "Theoretical Implications of Matrix Permutation in Fore (New Guinea)", Anthropological Linguistics 5.8.1-23. —. 1964. "Beyond the Sentence", Jour, of the Conf. on College Comp, and Comm. 15.129-35. (Also in Brend, 1973.192-99.) —. 1964b. "Discourse Analysis and Tagmeme Matrices", Oceanic Linguistics 3.5-25. (Also in Brend, 1974.285-305.) —. 1965. "Non-Linear Order and Anti-Redundancy in German Morphological Matrices", Zeitschrift für Mundartforschung 32.193-221. —. 1967a. "Grammar as Wave", in Monograph 20.1-14, Georgetown University, Institute of Languages and Linguistics. (Also in Brend, 1972.231-41.) —. 1967b. "Tongue-Root Position in Practical Phonetics", Phonetics 17.129-40. (Also in Brend, 1972.221-30.)

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—. 1967c. "Suprasegmentals, in Reference to Phonemes of Item, of Process, and of Relation", in To Honor Roman Jakobson 1545-54. The Hague: Mouton. —. 1973. "Sociolinguistic Evaluation of Alternative Mathematical Models: English Pronouns", Language 49.121-60. —. In press. "Toward the Development of Tagmemic Postulates", in Tagmemics, Brend, ed. Pike, Kenneth L., and Ivan Lowe. 1969. "Pronominal Reference in English Conversation and Discourse: A Group Theoretical Treatment", Folia Linguistica 3.68-106. (Also in Brend, 1972.261-97.) Pike, Kenneth L., and Evelyn G. Pike. 1972. "Seven Substitution Exercises for Studying the Structure of Discourse", in Linguistics 94.43-52. Pike, Kenneth L., and Evelyn G. Pike. 1974a. Grammatical Analysis. Huntington Beach, Calif.: Summer Institute of Linguistics. Mimeo. Pike, Kenneth L., and Evelyn G. Pike. 1974b. "Rules as Components of Tagmemes in the English Verb Phrase", in Advances, Brend, ed., 175-204. Poythress, Vern. 1973. "A Formalism for Describing Rules of Conversation", Semiotica 7.285-99. —. 1974. "Embedded Pronoun Reference", Information and Control, 24.336-57. —. In press. "Tagmemic Analysis of Elementary Algebra", Semiotica. Schottelndreyer, Burkhard, and Kenneth L. Pike. 1973. "Paired Sentence Reversals in the Discovery of Underlying and Surface Structures in Sherpa Discourse" in Austin Hale, ed., Clause, Sentence, and Discourse Patterns in Selected Languages of Nepal, Part I. Summer Institute of Linguistics Publications in Linguistics and Related Fields 40.1.321-60. Stewart, J. M. 1967. "Tongue-Root Position in Akan Vowel Harmony", Phonetica 16.185-204. —. n.d. "The Typology of the Twi Tone System" (with comments by P. Schacter and W. E. Welmers), preprint from the Bulletin of Institute of African Studies I, Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana. Tench, Paul. 1972. "A Paired-Level Hierarchy in Phonology", a paper presented to the Research Seminar in Phonetics and Linguistics, Cardiff. Manuscript. Trail, Ronald. 1973. "Notes on Sentence Structure". Manuscript. Wise, Mary Ruth, and Ivan Lowe. 1972. "Permutation Groups in Discourse", Languages and Linguistics: Working Papers 4.12-34. Georgetown University School of Languages and Linguistics.

THE CHALLENGE OF HISTORY W . P. L E H M A N N

ABSTRACT Based on a long tradition historical linguistics, including that in this country, has reached a high level of achievement in dealing with the phonological and lexical elements of language. Further, the methods used in historical study are constantly being sharpened and the treatment of specific languages and specific phenomena are being updated. Moreover, the procedures developed in the study of thoroughly investigated languages are being applied to additional languages, such as those of Middle America, Africa and Asia. But until very recently the treatment of historical syntax has been concerned with surface phenomena; as a result syntax has not been prominent in historical grammars, or in classificatory and comparative linguistics. Procedures developed recently to deal with the abstract underlying patterns of syntax and with typological features enable historical linguists to remedy this shortcoming. Since the major typological features and patterns are clear, historical linguistics must now investigate a wide array of languages to examine the role of these features, noting especially this role as languages change. Linguists must also examine additional features with typological importance. Two are noted briefly: person markers on verbs, and the order of elements in compound numerals of the pattern fourteen. Through carrying out the kinds of studies proposed, historical linguistics will continue its task of providing explanations for the phenomena of language; it will also contribute to a more secure understanding of language.1 In a remarkable observation almost t w o centuries ago students of language came to hold that languages as well as the peoples which use them have a history. Since Herodotus, historians in the western tradition have commemorated 'the great and marvelous deeds' of the past; historians have also transmitted the words associated with great deeds. But words and languages were treated as characteristics of the peoples described, somewhat like their fashions in clothing and their practices in games. Around the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, languages were examined as objects with a history, almost independently of their speakers - notably Sanskrit and the other Indo-European languages, the Finno-Ugric and the Semitic languages. The history of 1 Some of the research on which this essay is based was carried out with support from National Science Foundation grant GS-3081.

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languages extended a challenge to their investigators, at times occupying more of their attention than did any other kind of linguistic investigation. Besides recalling previous contributions, this paper aims to sketch current historical linguistic investigation and to note the central position of historical linguistics in the study of language, especially for the explanation of linguistic phenomena and our understanding of language. As some of its foremost scholars have reminded us, historical linguistics has pursued numerous aims. One of the most prominent is classification. After Sir William Jones stirred the imagination of European intellectuals by his statement that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin had "sprung from some common source", linguists devoted much of their energies to determining the interrelationships of many of the languages of Europe and Asia, and their position in the class or family known as Indo-European. Genealogical classification has occupied historical linguists since Jones's day. Yet languages can be classified by other criteria, notably typological characteristics (Robins 1973). And as Antoine Meillet stated of Basque, isolated languages "have no history", affording as a result no grounds for geneological classification (MeilletFord 1967:25"). Accordingly the aim of classifying languages by their source may lead to frustration, and may even encounter impatient objection, as by Mary Haas in the series of lectures she presented at the Linguistic Institute held on the fortieth anniversary of the Society (Haas 1969V Haas proposed that historical linguists should concentrate on comparative rather than classificatory linguistics. Comparison would lead to accomplishing the aim of reconstructing proto-languages and obtaining "a comparative grammar and dictionary of each protolanguage" (Haas 1969:75). Yet as Meillet illustrated in his clear-sighted book, The Comparative Method in Historical Linguistics, proto-languages can only be reconstructed in part by linguistic methods (Meillet-Ford 1967:36-59). Examples abound to support this statement: if Herodotus had not reported that the Greeks came to know ¡cannabis among the Scythians and Thracians, comparing Latin cannabis and OE henep, we might conclude that the Proto-Indo-European lexicon included a term for 'hemp'. Rather than classification or reconstruction of protolanguages, comparative historical linguistics has as its object in Meillet's eyes the interpretation of linguistic data "in a systematic way" (MeilletFord 1967:14). This concern of historical linguistics: the interpretation of data, is in my view its principal aim. The primary challenge of history for the student of language then is the determination of methods and

THE CHALLENGE OF HISTORY

43

data which will permit explanation in our study of language, and to use these methods for the explanation of specific phenomena. Explanation is used here in accordance with R. B. Braithwaite, (1960:343). "To explain a law is to exhibit an established set of hypotheses from which the law follows." The set of hypotheses applying to phonological laws was progressively specified in the nineteenth century and is still being sharpened. A survey of the studies leading to the "established set of hypotheses" in historical phonology would be equivalent to a history of the eminent works in historical linguistics. See Lehmann 1967 for some of these studies. The interpretation of data has always been one of the principal concerns of historical linguistics. In its beginnings historical linguistics, using non-linguistic historical knowledge, provided an explanation for the presence of doublets in a language like NE father and paternal, two and dual, horse and courser, among others. The explanation was phonological. In proposing the explanation for these phenomena in Germanic, Rasmus Rask, Jacob Grimm, and their associates formulated rules, or laws, of phonological change by which later forms could be systematically related to earlier forms in a specific linguistic tradition, like that referred to as English. Jacob Grimm's Regeln (rules) as he called them, led to a secure classification of the Indo-European languages, and provided the possibility of reconstructing proto-forms. Phonological rules also indicated means for distinguishing various traditions and their impact on one another. Such varying traditions and their interrelationships have subsequently been investigated by dialect geographers and sociolinguists. With the law, as many linguists call Grimm's set of rules, and with other such rules, we explain the phonological relationships between forms as varied as NE two, Latin duo and Armenian erku (Meillet-Ford 1967:18). The same methods are applied in dealing with the phonological structures of other languages. The views on sound change, on the processes involved in it, and on the methods used in dealing with the phenomena have been examined and reexamined from various theoretical points of view; the works cited represent only a sample (Malkiel 1968, Weinreich, Labov and Herzog 1968, Kiparsky 1971, Labov 1972, Vennemann and Wilbur 1972, Anttila 1974, van Coetsem 1974). The fascination of providing historical explanations for any language studied, and for languages of special concern to European linguists, like the major Indo-European languages, occupied and virtually overwhelmed linguistics in the nineteenth century. It led to a highly acclaimed

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scientific methodology, notably the comparative method. It also led to remarkable general interest in the study of language, so that as Haas has pointed out historical linguistics was acclaimed the "queen of the historical sciences" in a period when history was among the preeminent intellectual interests in the western world (Haas 1969:78). The concern for phonology was paralleled with a concern for the lexicon. Pairs like brother and fraternal might well be accounted for by examining the history of the English phonological system; but phonological procedures left unexplained pairs like son and filial, horse and equine, god and divine among others. The relationships between nouns and adjectives illustrated by these examples could not be accounted for by examining the history of English sounds. Rather, the history of the stock of words had to be studied. Lexical interpretation was in a sense dependent on phonological history, and therefore developed somewhat later. Until the phonological correspondences between English and Latin were understood it was not clear that goose and anserine, developed from the same root, or wheel and cycle, but that day and diurnal had to be derived from different protoforms, and so on. The great lexical pioneer in historical studies, August Friedrich Pott, followed Grimm and the other early phonologists, and based his etymological observations on their phonological laws; even with this advantage he was roundly criticized by Holger Pedersen for including "much that is worthless" in his principal work, Etymologische Forschungen auf dem Gebiete der indogermanischen Sprachen, which was published in ten volumes from 1859-1876 (Pedersen 1931:262-64). Moreover, Grimm's law and other early phonological observations have maintained themselves better than did the early lexical work. Yet in time, the lexicon of the Indo-European languages was explored as thoroughly as were their phonological systems. The study of other language families followed similar lines. Happily such study has become widespread, as of the Middle American languages, to cite only one of the many areas investigated and only a small number of the works concerned (Whorf 1935, McQuown 1956, Longacre 1967). Historical study of the lexical stock of specific languages and language families made remarkable advances. In thoroughly explored language families like the Indo-European, highly detailed studies of lexical sets have been made; one example is the detailed analysis of the set of kinship terms (Friedrich 1967). The understanding of the history of lexical items is also clear in the treatment of less widely studied languages. Powell's classification of American Indian languages made use of the methodology developed in the lexical study of the Indo-European and other families.

THE CHALLENGE OF HISTORY

45

The analysis of individual items also resulted from applying the careful methods learned in such study, as when Sapir identified the expected Hupa word for 'rain' in the compound for 'hailstorm' (Mandelbaum 1949:80-81). Other instances might be cited to illustrate that historical studies of the lexicon have been carried out with as great reliability as have historical studies of phonological systems. Where ample effort is applied to the history of languages, their phonology and lexicon can be capably treated; depending on the data available and the success of the specialists concerned, much of the phonology and the lexical stock of a language can be convincingly accounted for. The authority exhibited by historical linguists in these phonological and lexical studies was based on their confidence in the rigorous philological techniques used for controlling the data of language, and on their confidence in increasingly refined methods. These techniques and methods have been presented in many historical grammars, such as Schwyzer's. They have also been discussed in handbooks such as Meillet's (1937) and in treatises on the various methods. Meillet in his lectures of 1924 presented an excellent statement on the comparative method with illustrations of some of its results (Meillet-Ford 1967); subsequently Hoenigswald scrutinized its procedures with great precision (1960, 1973). The method of internal reconstructions, after Saussure's brilliant application of 1879, has been examined by numerous scholars (Kurylowicz 1964). Moreover, phonological changes studied with the aid of these methods were examined for their relation to the individual and to society, with reference to the findings of contemporary psychology and sociology. Studies of the social conditions under which sound changes take place reached an especially high level under Meillet's aegis, as in Sommerfelt's observations in Wales, Ireland and Norway (Sommerfelt 1962). Basing their studies on such a background historical linguists presented their findings with assurance in the validity and the contributions of these to the understanding of language. The view of language in many earlier historical studies was also clear-sighted. For Brugmann linguists were to deal with the phonology, lexicon and syntax of language. The sentence is the central unit of language, and syntax the central segment of grammar; each segment is to be examined with regard to its role for meaning (Brugmann 1904: Preface, esp. VII-VIII, and elsewhere, e.g. 259). The elements of language for Brugmann are closely interrelated, as he indicates in a statement foreshadowing Meillet's celebrated phrase ou tout se tient: "the object of grammar, language, is a very complicated human activity, in which

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highly varied factors are at work together in mutual dependence on the whole, in which everything is basically conditioned by everything else" (1904: VIII fn. my translation). These views may indicate why handbooks produced by historical linguists such as Brugmann and Meillet are still not superseded. Yet in a report on American linguistics of the past fifty years it may be necessary to come to terms with a view that many of these very works are merely antiquarian. For two revolutions in linguistic theory leading to two 'new paradigms' are held to have occurred in the interim. On the other hand scholars grounded in the standard handbooks often view studies in the new paradigms as contributing little or no insights into the data or the problems discussed. From possible examples of such studies one by two of the prominent linguists of their day may be noted, the phonemic treatment of Hittite vowels and semivowels (Sturtevant and Trager 1942, 1943); vigorously opposed by Albrecht Goetze in the 1942 Linguistic Institute, the study was presented in several articles in Language and is probably disregarded by Hittite scholars today. Similar examples in the generative-transformational paradigm might be cited. Such studies are necessary if a new paradigm is to be advanced. But the advantages in clarification of particular problems are difficult to assess with reference to the energies invested. Moreover the misunderstandings resulting from the application of new terms and procedures to old problems are not always beneficial for clarification of the problems concerned. Reconciliation of terminology and points of view may not be brought about quickly, as the continued dispute on the contributions of the neogrammarians illustrates, even though the neogrammarians produced some of the admitted classic studies in historical linguistics. In spite of the achievement of such classic studies, historical linguistics seemed to have reached a certain plateau of accomplishment and interest half a century ago. Many publications dealt with details rather than with general linguistic problems. The treatment of syntax seemed expecially elusive, as reflected in Hirt's plaintive remark: "in many instances we find no explanations in the area of syntax. One assembles a series of facts but doesn't know what to do with them" (1934:vi). In view of this situation it is not surprising that recently the notable advances in historical linguistics have been made in the treatment of syntax. It is also of interest that the advances have resulted from use of the method of internal reconstruction. The comparative method has frequently been misleading in yielding a conflation of contemporary structures rather than the earlier construction. One example is the

THE CHALLENGE OF HISTORY

47

presentation of relative constructions in the Indo-European languages; a relative clause has been reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European on the basis of Greek and Sanskrit. Yet it has also long been proposed that earlier stages of these dialects were OV (Delbrück 1878, Watkins 1964). Reconstruction of the VO relative clauses of Greek and Sanskrit for Proto-Indo-European by use of the comparative method leads to a typologically inconsistent structure. For progress in historical syntax, reconstructions must be proposed in accordance with general observations concerning syntactic structures, much as phonological reconstructions have been in the past. Moreover, as Meillet pointed out, reconstructions must rely heavily on 'anomalous' patterns (1967:39-43). "The original form" may be "nowhere preserved" (1967:43). Examples of such anomalous patterns, which have attracted little attention until recently are the English order of descriptive adjectives with regard to their head noun in contrast with that of relative constructions, or comparative constructions like Latin te major 'you-from bigger' in early Indo-European languages as well as major quam tü 'bigger than you'. Linguists were of course aware of such patterns in language. But they did not know their significance. Syntax in historical linguistics was virtually confined to the cataloging of surface phenomena. It is curious that the entire edifice of genealogical classification has been based almost wholly on surface phenomena. Apart from lexical items and sound patterns, which provide some abstract features, historical studies have restricted their examination almost exclusively to the selectional phenomena of syntax, and these primarily in inflection. Yet if we have learned anything from glottochronology, it is the constant erosion and loss of surface characteristics. In a very few millennia the surface elements of languages are so modified that they provide little more evidence for original relationship than can be attributed to chance. Unless historical linguistics can learn to draw on the underlying patterns of language, its contributions will be severely limited, either with regard to language families for which we have a long tradition, or to the relatively recent past of others. Fortunately, in one of its notable advances, historical linguistics has come to understand during the last few years how to make use of the underlying patterns of syntax. Although it is just at the beginning of this understanding, and although few specific patterns have been investigated, the basic methodology has been presented in numerous articles and in handbooks.

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The methodology is based on two streams of linguistic investigation. One is the greater attention to underlying syntactic structures, which American linguistics owes especially to the work of Zellig Harris and Noam Chomsky. The other is the understanding of typological characteristics, which we owe especially to the work of Edward Sapir and Joseph Greenberg. These streams of investigation, when used in combination by historical linguistics, have led to explanation of syntactic data in specific languages and have provided guidelines for the interpretation of languages in change and their history. A simple example may demonstrate the validity of this statement. Syntacticians have for some time accounted for relative constructions through embedding (Lehmann 1974a: 61-68). The sharpened syntactic studies of the past decades have specified how descriptive adjectives and genitives are derived from relative constructions. We therefore expect these three syntactic constructions to observe the same order with regard to their head noun in any language. In many languages they do, such as French, Spanish, Irish, Arabic. These languages share other typological characteristics, such as verb object order and prepositional constructions, which lead us to classify them as consistently VO. Consistent OV languages like Japanese, Turkish, Dravidian also have the same order for the three nominal modifying constructions, but before head nouns. All of the languages cited manifest other characteristics which lead us to classify them as typologically consistent. English, with a combination of VO characteristics such as postposed relative constructions, and an OV characteristic like preposed descriptive adjectives is transitional. Further analysis of English syntactic constructions can give us insights into the historically expected patterns, in much the way historical linguists have used conflicting patterns like goose : geese in contrast with juice : juices and the like. By observing selected syntactic characteristics of any language then historical linguists may determine its earlier structure as well as account for specific constructions in the contemporary language. The standard characteristics may be summarized. They are position of verb with regard to its object, the construction which has given the designation for the two major patterns of language: VO and OV. Moreover, two further patterns of arrangement involving government, prepositions in VO versus postpositions in OV languages, and the order of comparisons of inequality, such as Japanese ie yori takai 'house from high' versus English higher than the house. Others are modifying constructions. In VO languages, as noted above, nominal modifiers follow their head noun; in OV they precede. Similarly, verbal modifiers precede

THE CHALLENGE OF HISTORY

49

their head verb in VO languages but follow it in OV. These and other patterns have been identified, and used advantageously in investigating and interpreting the history of numerous languages. As in the past, they have been established in investigations of languages with long traditions of data. Data in Old English for example support the conclusion that English at one time had more OV patterns than does the modern stage of the language. In the Beowulf, clauses frequently have verb final order. Moreover, the early Old English texts contain other OV characteristics, such as postpositions, OV comparative constructions, and many preposed nominal modifiers. Like the other Germanic languages, English has been developing from OV to VO structure. In this development the Germanic languages paralleled the majority of the Indo-European languages. Although this essay cannot summarize the many important contributions to our understanding of the IndoEuropean languages resulting from the insights provided by recent historical study, it may cite some examples how observations made by earlier syntacticians can be interpreted and how problems in IndoEuropean syntax have been clarified. Delbrück, the first great historical syntactician, found that most clauses in Vedic Sanskrit were verb final. He also observed that the prepositions of classical Sanskri were postposed in Vedic, and he found comparative constructions of the OV type. Moreover, he and his contemporaries noted that more than 50% of the Vedic relative constructions were preposed, as were attributive genitives and adjectives (for a brief summary, see Lehmann 1974a :61-63). But he did not associate these syntactic characteristics; his syntax was descriptive, not explanatory. Moreover, he did not view the syntactic patterning of Vedic Sanskrit in the passage of time. The later Indie dialects, including Classical Sanskrit, have far more VO characteristics. And the earliest Vedic texts, such as the Rigveda, are more clearly OV than are the later, such as the Atharvaveda. Knowing the typological relationships of the patterns mentioned, and the trend of development in the various Indo-European dialects, we can propose with assurance that Proto-Indo-European was predominantly OV. Our assurance is deepened by Hittite, which is strongly OV. The assumption that Proto-Indo-European was predominantly OV permits us to account for features which have long puzzled Indo-Europeanists among them the absence of one relative marker throughout the dialects, the uncertain comparative markers, the late development of congruence markers as on adjectives, and many others, including some which will be noted below.

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More important for general linguistics is the understanding of language resulting from recent historical linguistic study. Moreover, if contemporary English syntactic patterns permit insights into the history of English, and if other languages such as Vedic Sanskrit permit similar insights, we can use the deepened understanding of historical linguistics to clarify problems in other languages, for example Sino-Tibetan or Niger-Congo. Historical linguistics can also account for many of the features of the central component of language, and proceed to deal with language in all of its facets, in this way providing understanding for more than surface features. With its previous concentration on phonology, historical linguistics has contributed little to an understanding of the interrelationships between syntactic categories and other syntactic devices, such as arrangement and intonation. Language has actually been poorly treated, as in the emphasis placed on the subject of the sentence; virtually all generative grammars, for example, have proposed as their initial P-rule: S -> NP VP or NP Aux VP. Concern with change in arrangement indicates however that the essential element of the sentence is the verb and its accompanying object. Hence the identification of the two major types of language as OV and VO. The central position of the object: verb complex could be illustrated variously; processes are cited below by which an OV language may become VO, and also the converse. The change of OV order to VO may be illustrated with the early Indo-European dialects. Many sentences in Vedic prose and poetry are regularly OV, including their complements. The datives may be verbal nouns or infinitives, as in the two following passages from the Rigveda.

RV 9.105.5 sakheva friend-like

sakhye to-friend

ruce for-light/ esteem nom.sg.m.-ptc. dat.sg.m. nom.sg.m dat.sg.f. 'Add to esteem like a manly friend to his friend!' naryo manly

RV 1.51.1 bhuje manhisfham abhi for-providing most generous inf.w.dat.ending acc.sg.m. ptc.w.verb 'Praise the very generous poet ( = Indra) so

bhava be 2 sg.imper.

vipram areata singer praise acc.sg.m. 2 pl.imper. that he will provide profit.'

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THE CHALLENGE OF HISTORY

In accordance with a pattern that has been noted in other languages as well, datives are among the first elements placed to the right of the verb. The Indo-European infinitives then came to be placed after the verb. RV 7.88.3 prd

prenkha inkhayavahai subhe kdm in-the-swing we-will-rock for-making-a-show ptc.w.verb loc.sg.m. caus.subj.l.du. infin.w.dat.ending ptc. 'We two will rock in the swing in order to make a show.'

When accompanied by additional nouns, such infinitives develop to complex complement constructions, as in the following example from Thucidydes. 5.35 epeisan they-persuaded aor.ind.3.pl.

toils the acc.pl.m.

Athenaious Athenians acc.pl.m.

Pulou Messenious kai Pylos Messenians and gen.sg. acc.pl.m. conj. 'They persuaded the Athenians other Helots from Pylos'

hdste so-that ptc.

toiis the acc.pl.m. to withdraw

eksagagein to-take-out aor.inf.

ek from prep.

allous Heilotas other Helots acc.pl.m. acc.pl.m. the Messenians and the

Whether the complements contain non-finite verb forms, as in this example, or finite verb forms as in dependent clauses, they regularly follow the verb of the principal clause, contributing further to a breakdown of the OV structure. The individual steps of the process could be indicated in detail for Indo-European dialects, or for other languages which are breaking away from the OV pattern; studies of such syntactic change will occupy our students for some time. Wherever such studies have been pursued, they point to the central importance of the object: verb unit in language. They also indicate that the NP, or subject, of the NP VP rule is essential primarily for VO languages, particularly for those with contiguous VO. When the V is initial, as in Irish or many Afro-Asiatic languages, subjects are facultative. Recent historical study has accordingly illuminated the structure of the sentence and its principal categorial elements. The interrelationships between categorial elements, and between

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syntactic constructions, have also been clarified by historical investigation of OV languages, as of the Niger-Congo family. Syntactic changes in Niger-Congo illustrate on the one hand the interrelationship between prepositional constructions and verbal, and also the process by which a YO language may become OV. Niger-Congo languages have serial verbs, as in Yatye: iywi

awa

otsi

ikii

utsi

child took stick shut door 'The child shut the door with a stick.' If a second serial verb is used without an object, the clause order is OV, as in the following Yatye example. iywi

awa

utsi

ikii

child took door shut 'The child shut the door.' Here the first serial verb has become equivalent to a preposition. The principal verb is final, and if this pattern becomes standard as it has in many Niger-Congo languages, the clause structure is OV. Further information on the specific syntactic changes, on their implications for our understanding of the Niger-Congo languages and of language generally, can be found in recent papers of Givon and Hyman (1974). An earlier paper by Li and Thompson yielded other insights into categorial elements, investigating the change of Chinese from a VO toward an OV structure. Li and Thompson proposed an early syntactic shift similar to that in Niger-Congo, with serial verbs becoming nonserial (1974). Puzzled however that the change to OV, which had begun in Archaic Chinese, was not completely carried out, they noted that a subsequent device to indicate definiteness interfered. By this device any noun preceding the verb is definite. Since the device to indicate indefiniteness is cumbersome, the VO word order was not totally eliminated. Expression of the syntactic category of definiteness has accordingly interfered with the rearrangement of the clause. These examples may illustrate some of the recent contributions made by historical linguistics to our understanding of language. Any theory of language must clearly be constructed in accordance with these findings, to the extent that these findings are validated. Since the observations are not confined to one language family, their implications challenge linguists

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to detailed study of all language families, and formulations of general linguistic theory on the basis of such study. Inasmuch as explanatory historical study of syntax has only recently been pursued, many of the hypotheses proposed must be provisional. The opportunities for testing such hypotheses, and for expanding their scope, are so huge that historical studies should be undertaken broadly. Two syntactic patterns not examined before this year illustrate possibilities and implications which may be drawn for historical studies and for our understanding of linguistic structure. The first has to do with person markers. In an unpublished paper of January 1974 David Ingram has proposed the following principle of order for person markers: In a structurally balanced system, a person marker will occur on the same side of a verb as the NP to which it refers. Chipewyan, an OV language, exhibits a balanced system, with the pattern SO o-s-V; the order of object marker -o- and subject marker -s- is in accordance with Emonds's observations on movement, in this way lending support to a study in synchronic linguistics. Examining with this principle the Salish languages, which are VO, Ingram observed that many of them exhibit the expected pattern V-o-s SO. The Southern Interior languages however show some irregularities, as in the continuative pattern o-s-V SO. On the basis of the irregular continuative and other patterns, Ingram suggests that the Salish languages were at one time OV. For in this way the preposed personal markers can be accounted for. Ingram's hypothesis is of great interest for the history of the Salish languages, for possible implications concerning their contacts with other language groups, and for general linguistic study. Detailed interpretation of the Salish data must be pursued by specialists. Implications of Ingram's principle, however, may be applied to other languages, among them the Indo-European. In the Indo-European languages, markers which seem to be designed to indicate person follow the verb, as in Sanskrit dadhami, dadhasi, dadhati 'I place, thou placest, he places' - or the injunctive dham, dhas, dhat 'I put, thou puttest, he puts'. If the endings are indeed person markers, and if Proto-IndoEuropean was OV, by Ingram's principle we would expect the markers to precede the verb. Several hypotheses may be proposed to solve the difficulty. Early PIE may have been VSO, and the order would then be regular; but the data do not support the possible conclusion that ProtoIndo-European was VO when the endings were first attached. It may

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then be that the endings were not person markers originally, but rather congruence markers. Such an explanation for the personal endings in early Proto-Indo-European was suggested some time ago (Lehmann, LSA, 1968 paper). Whether or not Ingram's observations are viewed as support for such a hypothesis, the chief interest here is not classification of a detail in one language family, but rather the illustration of increased understanding of language derived from the application of a historical perspective. This example is the more remarkable because it illustrates the assistance that may be derived from languages attested only today to the study of languages with a long tradition. Moreover, broadened understanding of specific linguistic patterns provides hope for more detailed histories of language groups such as Salish. And if Salish constructions can be explained on the basis of contemporary data, explanations based on greater time depth will also be possible for protolanguages like Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic. Ingram's observations also assist us in understanding the structure of specific language types and specific languages. In OV languages, for example, person markers are relatively rare. Their rarity may be a result of the awkwardness resulting from the required prefixation in contrast with the mandatory suffixation of verbal qualifiers in OV languages. This is another example of the operation of opposing processes such as that observed by Li and Thompson for Chinese, with its conflict between OV order and the indication of definiteness through preverbal position of nouns. Specific examples clarified by Ingram's principle are available in the Semitic languages. In the perfective, Semitic indicates person by suffixes, as would be expected in VSO languages. In the imperfective, however, prefixes are used to indicate person. Semiticists have traditionally explained the imperfective as a nominal form; the marker then may be for congruence rather than person. If this hypothesis holds, Semitic would support the hypothesis for the verb endings of Proto-Indo-European, and also Ingram's principle. Observation of person markers on verbs accordingly may provide fruitful means for understanding the historical development of a given language, as well as linguistic structures generally. I have pursued the example at some length to illustrate how the historical framework for syntactic studies now available provides possibilities for new insights based on the observation of patterns not yet exploited. The arrangement of components in cardinal numerals from eleven to nineteen is a minor linguistic pattern. But it illustrates how

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such a minor pattern may clarify the historical development of a language. In OV languages the numerals from one to nine are placed after the numeral for ten if the teens are constructed with compounds like English fourteen or Tamil padi-nalu 'ten-four = fourteen'. (I am grateful to Hundirapola Ratanajoti for calling my attention to this pattern.) Before we use the pattern for the teens for typological and historical purposes, we wish to know whether it is more than superficial, and if it is, how it is related to abstract patterns in the language. I propose that it is comparable to the comparative pattern; 'ten' is comparable to the standard, and the lower numerals are associated with it as an adjective is with the standard. Accordingly we may use the patterning of the teens in our efforts to understand languages. The relationships of the patterning of the teens to that of the 'ty's' and other numerals are also of interest; but they will not be pursued here. When we examine the teens of the Indo-European languages, we find they are largely VO in structure; Latin as ündecim for 'eleven', Greek héndeka, Sanskrit éká-dasa. But there are problems. Among the most striking are the numerals with postposed units, as in Attic Greek déka heis, Latin decern duo and the only attested Osco-Umbrian teen desenduf '12'. Moreover, above '13' the Greek numeral system has phrases using kaí: treís kai déka, téttares kal déka, and so on; Schwyzer calls attention to the use of this late, specifically Greek connective rather than the inherited te, and he proposes tentatively that an additive combination using prepositions or adverbs might have preceded it, supporting this conjecture by referring to such patterns in Old Church Slavonic, Lettish, Celtic, Tocharian and Albanian (Schwyzer 1939:594). Even the Indie teens are problematic as dvandva compounds - structures which are not normally assumed for Proto-Indo-European (Whitney 1896:178-79, 485-88). In short, while at first view the numerals for the teens seem to be those expected in VO languages, everywhere there are irregularities pointing to an earlier pattern. Examining these irregularities we may propose that the Proto-Indo-European pattern was OV, and that it came to be remodeled individually in the dialects. Further, we might predict that if an Anatolian 'teen' is ever discovered, it will have the OV pattern. Another notable pattern of the teens is that found in Germanic and Lithuanian. In these dialects the teens are made on the pattern 'one left = eleven', e.g. Gothic ainlif, twalif, a pattern carried through the teens in Lithuanian from vienúolika '11' to devyniólika '19'. This pattern, probably the most aberrant of all, is found in dialects which preserved

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the OV structure longest. We may tentatively propose that it is a substitute pattern, introduced relatively late, and never regularized as were the patterns in Greek and Latin. Why the pattern was extended throughout the Lithuanian teens, why only to '11' and '12' in Germanic, and why it has been preserved for these numerals in Germanic are problems for Indo-Europeanists. But the type of construction introduced into these two dialects, and the entire pattern of irregularity, may provide insights into developments in other languages. Winnebago, for example, has cardinal numerals for the teens resembling those of Lithuanian, as Alfred Senn pointed out forty years ago. Can we assume from this pattern that Winnebago was undergoing syntactic change, even that like Lithuanian it was moving from an OV to a VO structure? Somewhat similarly, Quechua forms the teens in the OV pattern, with an element meaning 'having' following the numerals from one to nine, as in cinka uk-niyuk '10 1-having = 11'. Is this formation a possible index of a shift in the structure of Quechua, a consistent OV language ? These examples may illustrate how the challenge of history has come to be more subtle, and more closely focussed on the central components of language. When Jones aroused interest in the historical study of language, his remarks were incorporated in a lecture urging historical study of a culture. Data from language furnished a portion of the "four general media of satisfying our curiosity concerning" the history of India (Lehmann 1967:14). Subsequent historical study has developed means for arriving at a precise analysis of linguistic structures so that we may "satisfy our curiosity" about minute structural characteristics, whether of languages attested only today or for millennia. Even for phonology, but much more so in syntax the patterns to be studied have by no means been exhausted, as the recent recognition of the significance of serial verbs, or person markers, or the teens indicate. Moreover, besides these typologically regulated patterns, historical linguists must identify the unique characteristics of language families, such as the characteristic of subjectivity in the Indo-European languages (Lehmann 1974b). In addition to knowledge of more characteristic patterns historical linguistic study will lead to deeper understanding of language. I have proposed above that the so-called person markers in Proto-Indo-European were in origin markers of congruence. But OV languages do not need, and do not normally have, congruence markers. If Proto-IndoEuropean introduced such markers, it must have been moving towards a VO structure. For specific Indo-European purposes we would like

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to know the reasons for such a change; for general linguistic purposes we would like to understand the role of categories, like congruence and other characteristics, in linguistic structures. We indeed recognize the roles and interrelations of categories through descriptive study, or even in the study of a family, as the person categories of Indo-European have long been recognized; but our understanding of them must be sought through historical study. Anyone who concerns himself with the historical study of language is aware of its recent low esteem. His own concern may have been maintained by the aim of Thucydides to see clearly what has happened inasmuch as similar events will probably happen again (Thucydides 1.22). But he also holds with a commentator more specifically concerned with language than was Thucydides that the historical point of view is not an end in itself but only a means to the end of arriving at an explanation of linguistic phenomena (Havers 1931:5). Recent deepened descriptive study of language has provided new, sharpened and precise data which calls for explanation. Advances in historical linguistics give some hope that progress can be made towards such explanation. University of Texas, Austin REFERENCES Anttila, Raimo. 1974. Analogy. (Preliminary unofficial version.) University of Helsinki: Department of General Linguistics. Brugmann, Karl. 1904. Kurze vergleichende Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen. Strassburg: Trübner. Delbrück, B. 1878. Die altindische Wortfolge. Halle. Friedrich, Paul. 1966. "Proto-Indo-European kinship", Ethnology 5.1-36. Givön, Talmy. 1974. "Serial Verbs and Syntactic Change: Niger-Congo", Word Order and Word Order Change, ed. Charles N. Li, 47-112. Austin: University of Texas Press. Haas, Mary R. 1969. The Prehistory of Languages. The Hague: Mouton. Havers, Wilhelm. 1931. Handbuch der erklärenden Syntax. Heidelberg: Winter. Hirt, Hermann. 1934. Handbuch des Urgermanischen, Vol. 3. Heidelberg: Winter. Hoenigswald, Henry M. 1973. Studies in Formal Historical Linguistics. Dordrecht: Reidel. —. 1960. Language Change and Linguistic Reconstruction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hyman, Larry M. 1974. "On the Change from SOV to SVO: Evidence from NigerCongo", Word Order and Word Order Change, ed. Charles N. Li, 113-47 Austin: University of Texas Press. Ingram, David. 1974. "A Note on Word Order in Proto-Salish". Unpublished paper. Kiparsky, Paul. 1971. "Historical Linguistics", A Survey of Linguistic Change, ed. William Orr Dingwall, 576-649. College Park: University of Maryland. Kurytowicz, Jerzy. 1964. "On the Methods of Internal Reconstruction". Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Linguists, 9-31 The Hague: Mouton.

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Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lehmann, W. P. 1967. A Reader in Nineteenth-Century Historical Indo-European Linguistics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. —. 1973. "A Structural Principle of Language and its Implications", Language 49.47-66. —. 1974a. Proto-Indo-European Syntax. Austin: The University of Texas Press. —. 1974b. "Subjectivity", Language 50.622-29. Li, Charles N., ed. 1974. Word Order and Word Order Change. Austin: University of Texas Press. —, and Sandra Thompson. 1974. "The Semantic Function of Word Order: A Case Study in Mandarin", Word Order and Word Order Change, ed. Charles N. Li, 163-95 Austin: The University of Texas Press. Longacre, Robert. 1967. "Systemic Comparison and Reconstruction", Handbook of Middle American Indians, ed. Robert Wauchope, Vol. V: Linguistics, ed. Norman P. McQuown, 117-59. Austin: University of Texas Press. Malkiel, Yakov. 1968. Essays on Linguistic Themes. Oxford: Blackwell. Mandelbaum, David G., ed. 1949. Selected Writings of Edward Sapir. Berkeley: University of California Press. McQuown, Norman A. 1956. "The Classification of the Mayan Languages", UAL 22.191-95. Meillet, Antoine. 1937. Introduction a l'étude comparative des langues indo-européennes. 8th ed. Paris : Hachette. —. 1967. The Comparative Method in Historical Linguistics. Translated from the French by Gordon B. Ford, Jr. Paris: Champion. Pedersen, Holger. 1931. Linguistic Science in the Nineteenth Century. Translated by John W. Spargo. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Reprinted under the title: The Discovery of Language, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Pott, August Friedrich. 1859-1876. Etymologische Forschungen auf dem Gebiete der indogermanischen Sprachen. Robins, R. H. 1973. "The History of Language Classification", Current Trends in Linguistics 11: Diachronic, Areal and Typological Linguistics, 3-41 Mouton: The Hague. Schwyzer, Eduard. 1939. Griechische Grammatik 1. München: Beck. Sommerfeit, Alf. 1962. Diachronic and Synchronic Aspects of Language. The Hague: Mouton. Sturtevant, E. H., and George L. Trager. 1942. "Hittite u Before Vowels", Language 18.259-70. —. 1943. "Hittite i Before Vowels", Language 19.209-20. van Coetsem, Frans. "Remarks on Some Generative Notions Concerning Language Change". Unpublished paper. Vennemann, Theo, and Terence H. Wilbur. 1972. Schuchardt, the Neogrammarians, and the Transformational Theory of Phonological Change. Frankfurt: Athenäum. Watkins, Calvert. 1964. "Preliminaries to the reconstruction of Indo-European sentence structure", Proceedings of the IX International Congress of Linguists, ed. H. G. Lunt, 1035-45. The Hague: Mouton. Weinreich, Uriel, William Labov, and Marvin I. Herzog. 1968. "Empirical Foundations for a Theory of Language Change", Directions for Historical Linguistics, ed. W. P. Lehmann and Yakov Malkiel, 95-188. Austin: University of Texas Press. Whitney, W. D. 1896. A Sanskrit Grammar. 3rd ed. Boston: Ginn. Whorf, B. L. 1935. "The Comparative Linguistics of Uto-Aztecan", American Anthropologist 37.600-08.

COMMENTS ON K. L. PIKE'S A N D W. P. L E H M A N N ' S PAPERS RAIMO ANTTILA

Professor Pike's paper shows in very clear relief how one-sided training in linguistics has been until now. It also shows, equally clearly, that some of the past achievements of tagmemics are entering the mainstream of linguistics only now, as it reaches its post-transformational (or postgenerative) stage. Pike's insistence on the importance of units is a theoretical necessity, although in generative-transformational grammar it was believed that rules are enough. But how could rules then apply to anything except to other rules ? Pike correctly points out that relationships also need units. This leads to the question of redundancy. Pike stresses the practical value of redundancy since it will lend support to a direct heuristic approach even in the middle of unknown data; it allows for operation without having to wait for the emergence of the total network. This is a most important point. Until recently, modern linguistics has ignored the fact that redundancy is used in communication; note now the rise of a kind of semiotics of redundancy (Roland Barthes). Linguistic training is basically directed toward methods of stripping off redundancy. This is incorrect schooling. Language use (which is primary, and which Pike knows quite well, see Pike 1954-55) requires the recognition of redundancy as a theoretical must, as does language acquisition. The direct representation Pike requires is also seen in the rise of the theoretical significance of the allomorph (e.g. in recent work by Michael Shapiro, Per Linell, Royal Skousen, Fred Karlsson, and myself). Linguists who eliminate redundancy write for themselves and in doing so do not describe or explain the language of a real speech community. The issue of redundancy leads to the question of generalization vs. particularization. 'To overplay a generalization is to lose insight into pattern' is well borne out by generative-transformational research whose 'linguistically significant generalization' is one of the emptiest slogans of modern linguistics (Linell, Karlsson). Bats are indeed bats, although

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TG mentalism cannot grasp it. Man is a pattern recognizing animal, as has been recently stressed by Fred Householder and Bruce Denying and, for that matter, the human brain has an enormous capacity for this (as it has for redundancy). The issue of particularization is crucial for language use and language change and for philology in general. These are aspects that TG has not been able to handle at all. Pike also places into proper perspective the question of substance vs. form and its connection with the predicament of formal languages. Language is closer to physics than to mathematics since in mathematics substance is irrelevant. In language, however, substance reflects back on form. The importance of this in language is further shown in that some logicians (e.g. Jaakko Hintikka) are willing to make logic leak exactly like natural language. One of the most interesting sections is ID with its diagrams (or diagrammatization) and the principle of making use of maximally clear types for less clear ones (cf. Lehmann's maximally consistent types OV and VO). Pike here develops diagrams of form that cover pronominal substance as intricate maps. This becomes a segment-level feature analysis in contrast to Jakobson's analysis of the Russian inflectional endings in terms of the phonological distinctive features. Similar diagrams can be drawn for allomorphs as they show indexical function (I have tried to show this in some of my recent work). The maximal type for this would be the interdigitating structure of Semitic. The English deictives this, there, those, these, thus, etc., have a kind of submorphemic deictic element th-. Here we have a parallel to Firth's notion of the phonaestheme as in slide, slip, slime, slush, sludge, slouch, slither, slink, sleek, slop, etc., a notion that has recently been revived by M. L. Samuels. All this fits quite well with Pike's pronouncement that grammar is particle, wave, and field (which resembles item-and-arrangement, item-and-process, and word-and-paradigm) and that one should have the freedom of shifting from one aspect to another. Finally, one should note that Pike does not restrict linguistics to mere language, but to human behavior in general. He is correct in assessing the current mainstream linguistics as closely allied to logical positivism, which has been as baneful to TG as it was to the post-Bloomfieldians earlier. Professor Lehmann starts from the fact that both languages and people have history (although his actual treatment abstracts language from its users and treats languages as objects). Instead of the early classification

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of change phenomena we should use history and historical linguistics for explanation and for the interpretation of data; the reference to Hupa philology conveys this succinctly. The explanation of the particular word order change at hand is said to derive from three traditions; (1) HarrisChomsky, (2) Sapir-Greenberg, and (3) historical linguistics. It would seem that the first one has the closest connection with discovery procedures, although the opposite is often implied or stated. Lehmann's treatment relies on it in the sense that he concentrates on diachronic correspondences (a notion used by Eugenio Coseriu and Henning Andersen), rather than on the mental (and other) factors of history. The statement that historical syntax has often been mere cataloguing of surface phenomena and that Delbruck's syntax was descriptive and not explanatory can easily be misinterpreted by the careless reader, since Classical philology deserves some real credit in this area. And how much is underlying in the patterning of OV vs. VO ? Note that this is both a surface phenomenon and a logical necessity. In short, there is no difference between surface and depth, if we concentrate only on the order of these two terms. In other words, 'depth' loses much of its significance, at least if we understand it in the sense currently used. The question of the Indo-European person markers could of course not be fully discussed in this context. Labeling them congruence markers is just a possibility. Lehmann's paper adds one facet to internal reconstruction (only the comparative method is mentioned in the text) and this is a method, like all other historical methods, that does not retrieve the past with certainty. Congruence would of course be an important aspect of redundancy (cf. Pike). One should note, however, that Lehmann is indeed careful to stress the word 'seems'. Throughout Eurasia we do have OV languages with person suffixes (e.g. Uralic), and this means that Ingram's principle is still just a heuristic principle. There is also some danger in using a notion like 'transitional stage' since all languages are always transitional. Even if we have maximally consistent types (OV, VO) it does not mean that any particular language should reach such a target. Compare this with the maximally efficient principle of 'one meaning - one form' in the make-up of (linguistic) signs. We know that natural language cannot thrive on that alone. Still it is an important ingredient in use and in change. Similarly, possibilities of word order are there so that semiotic use may be made of them, viz. in the building of diagrams; in this case, for example, of the difference between a main and a subordinate clause in German. "The challenge of history has come to be more subtle, and more closely

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focussed on the central components of language." The problem is that we do not have change without redundancy and periphery. The challenge remains and understanding must indeed be sought in historical study. As Lehmann says, its esteem is low but it is at least currently rising. This rise is further connected with a critical stance toward positivism and a plea for understanding, aspects in which Pike's and Lehmann's papers agree, and with justification. University of California, Los Angeles

REFERENCES Andersen, Henning. 1972. "Diphthongization", Language 48.11-51. Anttila, Raimo. 1974a. Analogy. University of Helsinki, Department of Linguistics Dress Rehearsals No. 1. —. 1974b. "Allomorfien semiotiikkaa", Virittaja 4/1974: 331-38. Barthes, Roland. 1967. Elements of semiology, transl. by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith. Cape Editions 4. London: Cape. Coseriu, Eugenio. 1958. Sincronia, diacronia, e historia; el problema del cambio lingiiistico. Montevideo. (Reprinted by Gredos, Madrid, 1974.) [German transl. by Helga Sohre, International Library of General Linguistics 3, Munich, Fink, 1974.] Hintikka, Jaakko. 1973. "Noam Chomsky ja kielitieteen vallankumous", Helsingin Sanomat 18.9.1973 and 23.9.1973. Karlsson, Fred. 1974a. Phonology, morphology, and morphophonemics. Gothenburg Papers in Theoretical Linguistics No. 23. •—. 1974b. Centrala problem ifinskans bdjningsmorfologi, morfofonematik och fonologi. Publications of the Phonetics Department of the University of Turku No. 13. Linell, Per. 1974. Problems of psychological reality in generative phonology: A critical assessment. Reports from Uppsala University, Department of Linguistics, No. 4. Samuels, M. L. 1972. Linguistic evolution with special reference to English. Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 5. Shapiro. Michael. 1974. "Morphophonemics as semiotic", Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 15.29-49. Skousen, Royal. 1973. "On analogy". Paper delivered at the LSA winter meeting, San Diego.

APPLICATIONS OF LINGUISTICS CHARLES A. FERGUSON

ABSTRACT Many linguists, in addition to their goal of 'the advancement of the scientific study of language', want to contribute to the solution of language problems. Six examples are discussed, three 'social' (national communication, mother tongue instruction, foreign language teaching) and three 'individual' (deaf language, reading, deception in language). Some current trends in linguistics will increase the relevance of linguistics for application to language problems, e.g. study of variation, use of social context, experimentation, cooperation among language sciences. Most trained linguists should be in careers of application outside the university.

When the Linguistic Society of America was founded fifty years ago the members said its purpose was the "advancement of the scientific study of language" (LSA Constitution, Art. 1). That purpose has not changed through the fifty years - linguists are still the scholars who perversely are interested in language for its own sake, not for the values of literature of which it may be the vehicle or the communicative uses to which it may be put. Linguists want to understand the workings of human language in an abstract, theoretical way which will somehow account for the universality and diversity of language structure and the ways in which languages vary and change. Alongside this primary purpose a quite different concern has often been apparent. Men and women interested in the scientific study of language have often been deeply involved in finding solutions for human language problems. As typical instances of this involvement I would point to two presidential addresses to the Society. In 1925, Herman Collitz devoted most of his address to the question of a single world language and in 1972, Dwight Bolinger discussed the question of truth in language and the use of language to deceive. Both speakers acknowledged that the findings of linguistic science offered no solution to the problems that concerned them, but they seemed to suggest that this might be a shortcoming of linguistics rather than a poor choice of theirs for a topic of speech-making at the LSA. Needless

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to say, many listeners in both instances felt uncomfortable at this stepping outside the accepted bounds of the scientific study of language. My purpose today, however, is to explore this other line of concern by asking what are some important language problems as we now see them and what might linguistics and other language sciences have to do with them. First, we will look at broad social problems and then at more obviously individual, personal problems.

NATIONAL COMMUNICATION

One of the urgent problems of our planet is how to assure the communication needed for full social and political participation at relevant levels of social organization. Professor Collitz's concern with assuring a single world language which everyone would acquire in addition to his own was a response to part of this problem. But the problem exists at many levels from the local PTA to the UN and is steadily becoming more acute rather than diminishing. The problem is not solved by placing communications satellites in orbit and distributing transistor radios to nomadic tribesmen. The level at which the communication problem is becoming most clearly seen is that of the nation, and the focus of most current studies seems to be communication networks and mass media. Yet the simple fact of who shares a mutually intelligible and nonoffensive variety of language with whom remains a stubbornly persistent element in all these calculations. As we have recently been rediscovering in our programs of bilingual education, legal use of Spanish, and so on in the United States, this problem is not limited to the sociolinguistic giants such as India, China, USSR, Indonesia, or to the multilingual majority of the so-called 'developing' nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Every nation has problems in balancing national integration and the vitality of component social groups. Every nation has such problems as making its laws, courts, and political processes linguistically accessible and providing education linguistically appropriate for the country's goals, and these problems always, by definition, involve questions of language. The relative effectiveness of alternative policies under different conditions and for different goals is largely unclear and the costs of a poor decision may be very heavy. In response to this broad question of national language policy formation a small body of empirical data and rather primitive theorizing has appeared (Rubin 1974) which has, on the whole, drawn very little from

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linguistics as such. If we were to ask what findings of linguistics are applicable in meeting this problem at least two traditional fields come to mind: language classification and phonological theory. Among the arsenal of techniques available to the language classifier I might mention, as an example, mutual intelligibility testing, which has evolved into a fairly sophisticated technique for obtaining a measure of similarity among related languages (Bender and Cooper 1971, Grimes 1974). This kind of quantitative measure can be a valuable part of the input for language policy makers, and is in fact being used in this way in several nations. The development of phonological theory, from the earliest formulation of the Indian grammarians to the most recent generative phonology, has always been related to the explanation and evaluation of orthographies and the notion of 'ideal orthography'. In fact, the creation of orthographies for unwritten languages and improvement of existing orthographies, has also become a highly sophisticated technique, based on phonological theory and relevant concepts of social change (Smalley 1964, Fishman 1974). The existence of linguistic research techniques or bodies of theory relevant to a general language problem must not lead us to assume that linguistics provides solutions to language problems - nothing is more likely to lead to disillusionment and failure than assuming a 'linguistic solution'. Linguists must recognize instead that their discipline can often contribute to the solution of a social problem involving language if it is properly combined with other kinds of information and expertise. Also, much though we like our own conceptual framework and find it impressive in its own right, we can hardly tell, for example, a highly trained political scientist or sociologist studying political processes in language policy formation and implementation that he is not - in some sense engaging in the scientific study of language. Let us welcome other fields to the family of language sciences.

MOTHER TONGUE INSTRUCTION

In all speech communities some varities of language are rated as 'better' than others by members of the community. Community notions of grammatically, acceptability, correctness, and appropriateness are very complex and are only beginning to be understood by linguists, since they involve factors of use and attitude which go far beyond the linguist's traditional concern with language structure. Nevertheless it is clear that

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every system of formal education is attempting, among other goals, to teach a 'better' variety of language to its pupils. In one community this may be chiefly some syntactic constructions, choice of vocabulary, and forms of discourse not used in the pupil's ordinary conversational language but regarded as standard for written and formal spoken use in the community. In another place it may be a substantially different dialect of the language or a totally different language. Whatever the details of the situation may be, a fundamental educational problem in every nation is how to assure the acquisition of a standard language to the level which the nation requires. In the United States it is not uncommon to hear assertions that many a college freshman cannot write a sentence in good English or that a particular regional or ethnic group cannot be hired for a certain job because of their poor language. I do not know how much of this is ritualistic complaint or reinforcement of social barriers and how much reflects real educational problems. But the basic problem of teaching standard language is universal, and the specific problems of how you teach standard English to speakers of English, standard French to speakers of French, and so on are unsolved, in the sense that some pupils acquire what is needed and some do not. School teachers and linguists have often assumed that an important ingredient in mother-tongue instruction is explicit treatment of the grammar of the language in a fairly abstract way. I have the impression that this in itself is not a crucial factor and that in any case the particular grammatical theory selected makes little difference. Traditional sentence diagramming seems no better or no worse than transformational trees or grammar school Latin-style parsing. The process of acquisition of a standard (as well as the standardization process itself) is not well understood. If the linguist can be of special help here it is probably in the precision with which he can specify the differences between standard and non-standard and the field experience which he can use in discovering in a given community which features are approved, not noticed, or stigmatized, and under what conditions. Specifying the details of the language behavior which is to be learned and separating this objective from the folk-lore and rationalization built up around it may be the linguist's greatest contribution here as it probably is in foreign language teaching in general (Ferguson 1966). Principled solutions to the problem of improved instruction in the standard form of the mother tongue are likely to come from careful sociolinguistic and pedagogical experimentation quite far removed from traditional linguistic concerns, but as in the more general problem of communication we have already examined, linguistics and the

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language sciences can contribute in important ways, and it is encouraging to see linguistic consultants now working with the major publishers of textbooks in this field.

FL TEACHING

So far I have not mentioned foreign language teaching as such, although the problem is implicit in the two previous problems explored. I will not spend much time on it since this field is the 'application' of linguistics which is most familiar. Unfortunately, in America the term 'applied linguistics' has come to mean something like language teaching methodology in spite of efforts on the part of the Center for Applied Linguistics and others to keep its meaning broader and more flexible (cf. Ferguson and Morgan 1959) and to emphasize the contributions of other fields to pedagogy. Unfortunately, also, some language specialists and even some linguists persist in the belief that there is a 'linguistic method' of language teaching. This has always seemed to me to be analogous to saying there is a 'botanical method' of raising plants. Successful horticulture cannot contravene the findings of botanical science but many factors other than botany are involved and an excellent theoretical botanist may be a poor raiser of plants and vice versa. Fortunately, however, books of mature scholarship do exist in this field which show the contribution of linguistics (e.g. Wilkins 1972). Before leaving the subject altogether I would only like to remind us that foreign languages are studied for a variety of reasons and the methods to be employed and the nature of the contribution of linguistics are likely to vary depending on the purpose - access to cultural or literary heritage, access to scientific research, ability to converse in a foreign country, use of a national lingua franca, intellectual curiosity, or many others. After these three examples of 'social' problems we may turn to several 'individual' language problems. Of course, this distinction is as artificial as distinguishing between analysis of idiolects and analysis of the speech of whole communities. Every social problem is manifested in individual problems: if a community has to acquire a new language, this means that individuals in the community have to acquire a new language. Some problems, however, seem more naturally to call for analysis of a particular person's needs and possible response to them. Thus if a man or woman is deaf, we see this as offering a personal language problem. In dealing with such individual language problems linguists are handicapped

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by their traditional lack of concern for individual differences. Linguists are professionally interested in universal features of human language, the structure of whole languages, or the linguistic differences characterizing groups of speakers. Many of the most severe language problems are, however, just such individual pathologies as deafness, aphasia, or stuttering. If linguists are to contribute to the solution of individual language problems they must sharpen their analytic tools to work with individual linguistic profiles and how they differ within a speech community. It is encouraging to see that linguists are moving in this direction all apart from any concern with practical language problems. In a recent volume on variation in English (Bailey and Shuy 1973) Haj Ross talks about individual syntaxes, and Barbara Robson and Lyn Kypriotaki struggle with individual phonologies. In some of our own work on phonology acquisition at Stanford, we have been led to recognize differences in individual strategies and to hypothesize that every adult, as a result of his or her personal history, has a unique phonological competence (Ferguson and Farwell). In all individual problems which are viewed as deviance or pathology, solutions require individual diagnoses. Success in characterizing individual cases and identifying types and syndromes rests on the possibility of making precise descriptions of language behavior and the availability of techniques which relate individual deviance to a norm or place individual behavior in a framework of linguistic variability. Increasingly, linguistic research is offering necessary resources here, and it is reasonable to hope for improved diagnosis of a whole range of problems, from childhood speech defects to senile aphasia.

DEAF LANGUAGE

Let us look at deafness as a language problem which seems quite far removed from traditional concerns of linguistics. A person who is congenitally deaf never acquires anything close to normal speech, and people with severe hearing loss, depending on the time of onset and the nature of the loss, have severe problems with the use of normal language. Along with this impairment in language use will go problems in the various areas in which language normally plays an important role: the socialization process, cognitive development, and communication and self expression in various contexts. Attempts to help the person with a hearing problem are directed either to the improvement in the processing

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and use of language or to the development of language surrogates which will fill some of the same functions. In the former case the value of linguistic analysis is evident, as in any case of language learning, but in the latter case the relevance of linguistics has only recently become clear. In our professional eargerness to emphasize the normal primacy of speech and the derivative nature of other forms of language we have overlooked the possibility that for some people under special conditions the primary form of language or 'mother tongue' may be something other than speech. It is a chastening experience for a linguist to discover that a hearing child of deaf parents may first learn to communicate fluently in sign language and eventually when he begins to acquire the spoken language of the larger community may show interference from the syntax and semantics of sign (Bellugi and Fischer 1972). It is encouraging to see more linguistic and psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic analyses of American Sign Language and other similar forms of communication (e.g. Stokoe 1969). Linguists will doubtless find that some of their traditional categories will have to be broadened and revised, perhaps even some fundamental assumptions about the nature of language and its origin may be brought into question, but the 'scientific study of human language' will be able to contribute with correspondingly greater effectiveness to the amelioration of such problems as deafness. Familiarity with the structure and use of sign may also suggest solutions to other problems and new approaches to therapy. For example, several psycholinguists and clinicians have recently used sign language with some success in treating autistic children (e.g. Bonvillian and Nelson).

R E A D I N G PROBLEMS

In any highly literate society some people learn to read much more quickly and easily than others, and in some nations, such as our own, there may be a substantial minority of individuals who have severe problems in learning to read which interfere with their ability to operate effectively in the society. It is reasonable to assume that at least some of these cases of reading disability involve physiological problems in language processing, but whatever the underlying causes, an expert understanding of the structure and use of language should have its contribution to make in the treatment of the problem. American linguists have often been interested in the teaching of reading, Leonard Bloomfield and Charles Carpenter Fries being two whose efforts are well known (cf. Wardbaugh

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1969), but linguists' interest in the teaching of reading has generally focussed on the relation between the phonological system of the language and the writing system used for it, and their recommendations have usually been intended for general application or for use with speakers of a particular variety of the language. The linguists have generally assumed that their understanding of phonological theory is directly relevant to reading and they have not usually joined with specialists of other disciplines in careful study of non-linguistic aspects of the reading process. The major contribution which linguistically oriented researchers and practitioners in the reading field are likely to make probably will come on the one hand from deeper understanding of human processing of symbolic systems, including sounds and written symbols, and on the other hand - once again - in the increased precision of individual diagnosis. Investigators must be prepared to find that the complexities of human language processing may in important ways go beyond or be in conflict with linguistic theory, and they must be prepared to find very different types of reading disability which respond to differential diagnosis and forms of assistance or treatment. The benefit here is likely to be just as great for the development of linguistic theory as for the improvement of the teaching of reading, and it is encouraging to find experimentation which recognizes this double purpose. For example, the research strategy of having non-literates and poor readers of various ages, including children as young as two-year-olds, play with non-oral representations of speech is highly promising for discovery of processing units and other aspects of phonological organization. Work like that of Charles Reed (1971) or Gleitman and Rozin (1973) should be a common part of phonological research in departments of linguistics as well as a standard variety of reading research.

DECEPTION IN LANGUAGE

Not all individual language problems are cases of pathology. The problems of deceptive use of language which concerned Bolinger and on a smaller scale Terry Langendoen in his paper on the FTC can certainly be seen as problems for individuals to learn how to cope with the barrage of lies and half truths that hits them from all sides. There is nothing new about using language to persuade or deceive - I assume these are among the oldest uses of language. What may be new is the amount, variety, and pervasiveness of persuasion disseminated by mass media, and many

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ordinary citizens feel need of help in coping with it. If we recognize this as a legitimate problem which the language sciences may help in resolving, we must go beyond statements of indignation and citation of striking examples. Exhortations to virtue are notoriously ineffective in achieving social change. From our perspective what is needed is an intensification of research effort on this kind of language behavior which could lead either to something like enforceable guidelines for producers of persuasion or to something like handy home kits for instant analysis of deceptive argumentation. Bolinger notes that current work on performatives, rules of conversation, loaded elements in the lexicon, and other topics is relevant, citing Robin Lakoff and other authors. In addition to this line of research I would suggest at least two approaches which promise substantial contributions to the linguistic analysis of persuasion. One is the kind of discourse analysis which studies whole registers. The varieties of language which are used for special purposes such as legal language, the language of scholarly publication, or the language of advertising constitute registers which differ systematically in grammar, lexicon, and forms of discourse from ordinary conversational language or the 'vernacular', as Labov calls it, and the investigation of the linguistic aspects of persuasion and deceit should be anchored in systematic analysis of these registers as well as the varieties of language more often studied by linguists. And it is encouraging to see analyses of this kind appearing among the increasing range of discourse studies. Bolinger alluded to the language of advertising in his address and at least two monographlength linguistic studies of the language of advertising have appeared which seem to be promising in this field. Geoffrey Leech's 1966 book described the English of advertising in Great Britain and Ruth Romer's book two years later examined the language of German advertising. Both of these studies dealt not only with syntactic and lexical characteristics but also rhetorical techniques and the relation of the advertising register to ordinary language. It is somewhat surprising in view of the extensive study of advertising content, goals, and effects by researchers in communication that more linguistically oriented studies of advertising have been conducted in Europe than in the United States. The only study that comes to mind is Harris's extended example in his paper on discourse analysis (Harris 1952). We need to produce some American linguists who are specialists in this kind of study. The other approach to the analysis of the language of persuasion and deceit which I want to mention is more typically American. I refer to the

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careful social psychological study of the actual effect of slight changes in language. As an example of the kind of study let me cite the research reported by Zilmann 1972 in which an elaborate experimental design made it possible to conclude that the change of a few sentences from statements to questions in the course of a lawyer's summation to a jury can bring about significant changes in the jurors' opinions in the direction of agreement with the views of the summator. Such a clear conclusion cannot, of course, be generalized to other situations or other kinds of changes, without extensive experimentation. This line of research, which requires a considerable degree of linguistic sophistication, attacks the basic questions piecemeal and probably leads down many false trails, but in the long run it may give a more solid basis for meeting the problem than the introspection and speculation of linguists. The half dozen examples of language problems we have looked at could easily have been replaced by a totally different half dozen such as translation needs, artificial intelligence problems, devising limited purpose languages, aphasia, talking after a tracheotomy, or maximizing intelligibility in interlingual electronic communication. Language problems are on all sides of us, and it is reasonable to assume that in every case the scientific study of language is relevant to some degree. Now I would like to say a few words about current trends in linguistics. It is worth asking whether the present directions of change in linguistics will be more conducive or less conducive to the application of linguistic findings to the solution of practical problems. My view is that most of the trends now apparent in linguistic study will increase the relevance and applicability of linguistics to problems of the kind we have been talking about. I would like to mention just four such trends which I think are strong enough to warrant notice. In mentioning these particular trends I am naturally reflecting my own biases since each of them represents a direction which I supported strongly in the early 1960s and even earlier and I feel gratified to see them growing stronger now. First, the study of variation. I do not have to spell this out since Labov's presentation this afternoon will be dealing with it in detail. It seems clear to me that linguistics as a whole is increasingly recognizing that the study of homogenous, idealized normalized languages is only a special limiting case of the linguistic study of human language behavior in all its enormous but orderly variability. Change and variation are of the essence of human language, and linguistic theories are moving to incorporate more and more of this. Every one of the problems we

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discussed involves language variation and change to a very great degree and better treatment of variation within linguistics will be correspondingly helpful in contributing to the solution of the problems. Second, the admission of social context. The study of pragmatics and sociolinguistics keeps moving closer to the core of linguistics. In a wellknown paper at the Georgetown Round Table in 1972 Charles Fillmore maintained that the basic goals of linguistics are not attainable without the inclusion of features of the social context of utterances. His list of striking and illuminating examples were drawn mostly from English syntax, and I took the liberty in a talk on a similar topic some months later (Ferguson 1972) of adding examples from phonology and lexicon in other languages. Whatever his or her theoretical perspective the linguist today is much more sympathetic to systematic treatment of social context and this cannot fail to make linguistic findings more directly related to problems of language use. Third, the use of experimentation. Although linguists have been dedicated to the scientific study of language, controlled experimentation, one of the most widespread and respected techniques of scientific investigation, has traditionally been very little favored. To take one simple example, linguists for the past 50 years have often implied or even stated explicitly that people tend to perceive foreign languages in terms of the phonological system of their own languages, and indeed that this is one of the justifications for the kinds of phonological theories that have been developed. One might expect that a broad stream of experimental studies would have flowed from this assumption so that by this time we would have a substantial body of research findings replicable by other investigators and in that sense predictive of human behavior and offering evidence for linguistic theory, but the experimentation is a mere trickle. One of the great merits of recent work in psycholinguistics is the increasing respectability of experimental studies with linguistic hypotheses. Such experiments may, of course, be poorly conceived, badly executed, or may give irrelevant or uninterpretable results, but by and large the promise is great and I find the trend to include experimentation among the linguists' working procedures a very good sign. In talking about the solution of language problems it is clearly a method which has great value, not least being the convincingness of its results for non-linguists. Finally, cooperation among the language sciences. Linguistics as a discipline has often been regarded as having strong interdisciplinary ties connecting it with physical sciences, social and behavioral sciences, and humanistic studies, but linguists have generally been concerned to

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establish the autonomy of their discipline and are proud of its accomplishments as an independent field of study. Today, however, many linguists and others studying human language and related phenomena find that they need one another. This is, if anything, more obvious in the solution of language problems. Even if we continue to feel that linguistics is at the core of the language sciences, it almost always must combine its contribution to the solution of a problem with the contributions of other fields, and often the linguistic share is relatively small even if highly important. I have only one comment left to make. It has to do with jobs. Linguistics programs in American universities are busy training linguists for jobs teaching linguistics in universities. I believe the figures are something like 85% of employed linguists in academic positions and 15% in other jobs. My feeling is that these figures should be reversed. Linguistics, given the nature of the discipline and the recognized needs of our society, is not like chemistry, where I am told 5 % of the Ph.D.s end up teaching chemistry in universities and the rest get jobs in industry, government, and research organizations. But I think the linguistic profession should be moving in that direction. Our society, and for that matter the rest of the world, is plagued with language problems which linguistics can help resolve, and I think the bulk of our output of linguists should be headed for careers outside the university. The small number of linguists needed for university programs should be recruited from those temperamentally suited who meet high professional standards, and most people trained in linguistics whether they regard themselves primarily as linguists or as attached somewhere else in the language sciences should be engaged in the application of linguistics. Stanford

University REFERENCES

Bailey, Charles-James N. and Shuy, Roger W. (eds.). 1973. New Ways oj Analyzing Variation in English. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press. Bellugi, Ursula, and Fischer, Susan. 1972. "A comparison of sign language and spoken language", Cognition 1.173-200. Bender, M. L., and Cooper, R. L. 1971. "Mutual intelligibility within Sidano", Lingua 27.35-52. Bonvillian, John D., and Nelson, Keith E. Forthcoming. "Sign language acquisition in a mute autistic boy". To appear in Papers and Reports on Child Language Development; submitted for review to Science.

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Collitz, Herman. 1925. "World Languages", in Anwar Dil (ed.) The Scientific Study of Languages, SO Years of LS A, 1924-1973. Abbott, Pakistan: LRGP, forthcoming (1974). Ferguson, Charles A. 1966. "Applied linguistics", in R. G. Mead, Language teaching: Broader contacts, 50-8. Menasha, Wise.: Northeast Conferences on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. —. 1972. "Sociolinguistic research and practical applications", Proceedings Volume II, Third Congress of the Association Internationale de Linguistique Appliquée. Heidelberg: Julius Groos Verlag. Ferguson, Charles A., and Farwell, Carol B. Forthcoming. "Words and sounds in early language acquisition: English initial consonants in the first fifty words", To appear in Language. (Preliminary version in Papers and Reports on Child Language Development 6.1-60 (1973)) Ferguson, Charles A., and Morgan, R., Jr. 1959. "Selected readings in applied linguistics", Linguistic Reporter 5.1-4. Fillmore, Charles A. 1973. "A grammarian looks to sociolinguistics", 23rd Annual Round Table, Roger W. Shuy (ed.) Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press. Fishman, Joshua A. Forthcoming. Advances in the Creation and Revision of Writing Systems. The Hague: Mouton. Gleitman, Lila, and Rozin, Paul. 1973. "Teaching reading by use of a syllabary", Reading Research Quarterly 8.4.447-83. Harris, Zellig. 1952. "Discourse analysis", Language 28.1-30. Langendoen, D. Terence. 1971. "Linguistic practices of the Federal Trade Commission", Linguistic Reporter 13.2.1-6. Leech, Geoffrey N. 1966. English in Advertising. London. Read, Charles. 1971. "Pre-school children's knowledge of English phonology", Harvard Educational Review 41.1.1-34. Römer, Ruth. 1968. Die Sprache der Anzeigenwerbung. Düsseldorf: Schwann. Rubin, Joan. 1974. "Language planning theory and documents". Linguistic Reporter 16.4.7-10; "Language problems in language planning", Linguistic Reporter 16.5.2-10. Smalley, William, et al. 1964. Orthography: Studies and Articles on New Writing Systems. Amsterdam : North Holland Publishing. Stokoe, William C. 1969. "Sign language diglossia", Studies in Linguistics 21.27-41. Wardbaugh, Ronald. 1969. Reading: A Linguistic Perspective. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Wilkins, D. A. 1972. Linguistics in Language Teaching. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press. Zilmann, Dolf. 1972. "Rhetorical elicitation of agreement in persuasion", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 21.159-65.

EMPIRICAL F O U N D A T I O N S OF LINGUISTIC THEORY 1 WILLIAM LABOV

ABSTRACT Throughout the past five decades, both structural and generative linguists have relied on formal or introspective judgments as sources of data. Widespread variation in such judgments has been attributed to idiosyncratic dialects, but these constructs have not been supported in empirical studies. This paper proposes four working principles to resolve current disagreement on the nature of linguistic facts: data from introspection, observation and experiment can be jointly used to build a theory which rests on the evidence of clear cases.

It is a common understanding among linguists that we are engaged in the general study of the structure of language, not gathering particular facts about languages; our aim is to understand the human capacity to construct a language system and not just to collect the output of that system. At the same time, we all want our explanations and analyses to be right; very few linguists are interested in grammar which is universal but wrong. At the least, our theories must fit any body of reliable reports of facts about language, and we have a vested interest in obtaining more reliable facts, even if we do not collect them ourselves. In this sense, all linguists are data-oriented, and we are equally concerned with the empirical foundations of our field. Some of the apparent differences between linguists on this question seem to be due to their rhetorical approach; others seem to be real differences in working strategy. In any case there has grown up a popular dichotomy which would wrongly lead outside

1 This paper is a revised version of the talk given at the Golden Anniversary Symposium of the Linguistic Society of America at the Linguistic Institute, Amherst, July 1974. Much of the research discussed here was carried out under a grant from the National Science Foundation, whose support is gratefully acknowledged. I have benefited from discussions with a number of colleagues, notably Mark Baltin. Throughout there are contributions from members of our research group at the University of Pennsylvania, whose help is acknowledged with thanks: Mark Baltin, Anne Bower, Gregory Guy, Donald Hindle, John Rickford, and Judy Weiner.

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observers to think that some linguists are interested in the empirical foundations of their field, while others are not. A common view of the history of linguistics in America over the past fifty years is that it can be divided into two major periods: in the first thirty years, from 1925 to 1955, American linguists were concerned with the description of language on the basis of objective facts; in the last twenty years, from 1955 to 1975, linguists have been increasingly concerned with the explanation of the language faculty through the study of intuitions. While this view overlooks a very large body of historical and phonetic investigation which has continued without any sudden shift, it does reflect the overt changes in terminology and topic to be found in most articles in most journals. It is particularly true in the way that linguists use the term theory: in the early period, theory is said to mean a set of procedures for writing grammars; in the later period, it means a set of universal principles governing the abstract models which can generate the well-formed sentences of the language. This review assesses the history of American linguistics in a somewhat different light. It will appear that native speakers' intuitions have been the main basis for linguistic description throughout this fifty years. But as the wealth and subtlety of linguistic description has increased, intuitive data has been found increasingly faulty as a support for our theoretical constructions. A new movement has therefore appeared to reconsider the relations between langue and parole - not to overturn the achievements of the past fifty years but rather to support and develop them. In the course of this discussion 1 will necessarily take up some problems of methodology, but only in so far as they concern fundamental issues.2 We will be forced to re-examine some basic questions: what is a language ? what is a linguistic fact ? and what is evidence for a linguistic theory ? We must first make the distinction between linguistic facts and linguistic explanations. It is well known that there is little agreement on what makes a convincing explanation, and it is common for some linguists to criticize other linguists for not being interested enough in explanations. But all of the linguists whose work I will consider here look at linguistics as an empirical science; all begin with linguistic facts as the subject matter for their theories to explain, and as the means of proving theories already constructed. 2 For a more detailed discussion of methodological questions, see "Methodology" (Labov 1971a) and "Some principles of linguistic methodology" (Labov 1971b).

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As we will see, most discussions of linguistic evidence begin with the assumption that we have a clear understanding of what the nature of linguistic facts is - not in detail, but in principle. Yet here the underlying disagreements can be even more profound than with linguistic explanations. If two linguists disagree about their explanations, the argument may be resolved with new facts; but if one linguist cannot persuade another that his facts are facts, he can hardly persuade him that his theory is right, or even show him that he is dealing with the same subject matter. A first step in reviewing the empirical foundations of our field is to point out the areas of agreement on this crucial question and then see where the disagreements may lie.

1. WHAT IS A LINGUISTIC F A C T ?

The search for empirical foundations cannot be directed intelligently unless we distinguish between variable and invariant phenomena in linguistic relations. The general program of all linguists begins with the search for invariance. Thus the fundamental postulate of linguistics set out by Bloomfield at the beginning of our development still stands without question: that some utterances are the same.3 The fundamental fact of phonetics is of course the opposite claim: that no two utterances are in fact alike.4 The basic mode of operation of linguistics andits raison d'être follow from the need to resolve this contradiction: we find in principle and in fact that some differences don't make a difference. This equivalence of variants, or free variation, is the obverse of the fundamental postulate. Our first finding of invariance is therefore at the initial statement of types or categories : that [haend] is a token of the same type as [hse:'nd], and the small differences in length, height and nasalization between these two utterances don't make any difference in a linguistic sense. There are a vast number of such facts about wellknown languages which we feel free to report, discuss and analyze without presenting any further evidence. In this case, we find or assume that introspective judgments, formal elicitation, observation and experiment all agree. When we read accounts of little-known languages, every 3 More precisely, "Within certain communities, certain utterances are alike or partly alike" (1926:154). 4 Bloomfield recognizes this in principle in his following comment: "Outside of our science these similarities are only relative; within it they are absolute. This fiction is only in part suspended in historical linguistics."

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statement is assumed to rest on the basis of a linguistic analysis of many such facts: we do not demand narrow phonetic transcriptions of utterances, in fact reject them as inadequate unless they accompany a broader transcription, because they fail to include the linguistic facts as to whether nasalization, rounding, glottalization, etc., make a difference in that language. Thus omission of data and the simplification of transcription is one way of stating linguistic facts. If all variation were at this superficial level, there would be no need for a linguistic analysis or for linguists. The interesting cases of invariant rules involve more abstract relations. Thus nasalized vowels seem to be opposed to oral vowels before voiceless stops in many English dialects, contrasting [kai.t] and [kaet]. The linguistic analysis that these nasal vowels represent underlying /VN/ is based on two kinds of facts: (a) that all vowels in this proposed abstract environment can be nasalized, and nasal consonant deleted, and (b) even for those who always do so, these tokens are heard as 'the same' as oral vowel plus nasal consonant. Here again we find introspection, formal elicitation, and observation coinciding, and we feel free to discuss this as a fact about English. At a more abstract level, we can say that English sentences which begin with sentential subjects demand complementizers:5 (1) For John to tell him was a shame. (2) John's telling him was a shame. (3) That John told him was a shame. (4) *John told him was a shame.6 Here again we can say that observations and introspective judgments are in good agreement, or to be more precise, that no one has as yet found any disagreements that would move us to begin a program of observation and experiment. Finally, let us consider the abstract statement that English extraposition moves the sentential subjects to the end of a sentence and realizes the surface subject as a dummy it, relating (1) and (5) transformationally: (5) It was a shame for John to tell him.

5

A fact which has recently been given considerably more theoretical importance by the suggestion that only languages with such obligatory complementizers have transformations which move elements to this position (Baker 1970). 6 The unaceeptability of (4) is made considerably clearer than most such cases by the observation that if it is acceptable, it seems to be heard as a form of "John told him that it was a shame" with an odd deletion of that and it.

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This analysis can rest upon two different kinds of linguistic facts: (a) that a regular relation exists between the two sentence types, so that for each token of type (1) there is an acceptable token of type (5), and (b), the meaning of the two types is the same for every pair of tokens. For the first fact, we can look for the agreement of introspective judgments and observation, though it would not be easy to build up a body of observations strong enough to support (a) as it is stated. For the second fact, we have not yet developed observational and experimental tools which would show such an agreement. All that we can say is that no one has yet claimed that the difference in formality between (1) and (5) is a difference in meaning in the linguistic sense. The crucial point here is an understanding that the linguistic 'meaning' which underlies the fundamental postulate is not equivalent to every kind of "meaning" in the sense of social significance, or emphasis. We may want to give great attention to differences in intonation contour, nasalization or foregrounding of linguistic elements: but these will be studies of expressive style or interactive force which must rest on the perception that these variants are alternative ways of saying 'the same thing' in a linguistic sense. The linguist interested in more complex structures should feel free to proceed further on the basis of these f acts about sameness. It would be fortunate for us if most facts about English syntax have this character, because we could not possibly hope to observe or test experimentally a significant proportion of the sentence types thai we have to deal with in a syntactically sophisticated grammar. Whenever we find such consensus on judgments of 'same' and 'different' we can feel safe in assuming that we are studying langue as the common property of the speech community. Thus we can profitably exploit the Saussurian paradox 7 to the extent that the speech community we are exploring is homogeneous, and study the social aspect of language through the intuitions of one or two individuals. If we did not do so, we would be injuring the empirical foundations of our field in a more serious way. If every linguistic fact had to be examined by representative sampling, experiment and observation, we would never proceed beyond the simplest patterns of the most well known languages. By adopting the opposite policy, and assuming general consensus to linguistic facts whenever possible, we are able to gather facts about a wide variety of languages, and explore deeply the syntactic 7 Briefly, that langue, the social aspect of language, can be studied from the speech of any one individual, while the study of individual features of parole requires a social survey (Labov 1972a: 186).

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patterns of those that have already been studied. The present growth of interest in general or universal principles of language 8 could not proceed except on this basis; we would be trying to draw general conclusions from a body of facts altogether inadequate in breadth and depth. In the first period of American linguistics, the problem of empirical foundations was seen primarily in terms of breadth of description. Boas, Sapir and Bloomfield tried to obtain from American Indian languages a broad range of linguistic descriptions to confirm and develop our view of linguistic structures and patterns of linguistic evolution. For Bloomfield, it was particularly important to demonstrate that the principles of internal reconstruction and the comparative method could be applied to languages without a literary history (Hockett 1948:504ff.). In approaching a new language community, it was normal to proceed with the assumption that one or two speakers would fully represent the language. Furthermore, the formal elicitation sessions with the informant focused upon his introspective judgments about how he would say a sentence, if he were to say it. This is still the normal procedure in linguistic field work today. The texts which are juxtaposed to these judgments are usually myths or formal speeches which encapsulate normative judgments of the best speech along with evidence of actual language patterns. Even those linguists who learn the vernacular language well enough to understand the free flow of conversation do not attempt to use such data as evidence in their analyses. Bloomfield plainly rejected the notion of a detailed study of the speech act in its social context. We do not trace the usage of a linguistic form in a community, act by act. Once the individual has acquired the habit of using a certain linguistic form, we assume that under certain constellations of [physical stimuli, personal conditions, and extra-linguistic group habits] he will utter it. Given the existence of a certain linguistic form in a community, we assume that it is spoken under such constellations, and concern ourselves only with its place in the total linguistic pattern and its gradual modifications. [1927, reprinted in Hockett 1970:175] The chief difference between descriptive linguists of the first period and generative linguists of the second is that the former dealt more with little known languages where the introspective judgments were not their own. The emphasis on objectivity of the data was thus intended to prevent 8 See for example Greenberg 1963, Bach and Harms 1968, and Stanford Working Papers on Linguistic Universals 1969ff.

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the peculiarities of the linguists' own intuitions from being taken as representative of the speech community, rather than exclude introspective observations altogether. In his analysis of "the Central-Western type of American English" Bloomfield (1935) begins at one point to cite his own speech as evidence for a long variant of /ahr/ which is always found in starch but is optional in march. The occurrence of these S forms is an elusive sub-phonemic feature; it is with the greatest diffidence that I shall list the forms as I seem to hear and speak them. He then adds an apologetic footnote: In view of my own complex linguistic background, both personal and professional, I have tried to describe not my own speech, but that of the people around me. So far as phonemic differences are concerned, this seems to offer little difficulty. As to sub-phonemic features, however, the situation is more complex. ... This restriction against using oneself as informant seems to have gradually eroded over the next two decades. Trager drew freely from his own North Jersey dialect for his observations of short /a/ (1930); Bloch made some of his heaviest theoretical points on the basis of his own phonology, as in the case of pa'd vs. pod (1941). This tradition of introspective dialectology has been continued in recent years by Sledd in his detailed analysis of his own Atlanta phonology (1966). At the same time, the descriptive linguists of this first period always preferred to use data on the speech of others when they could. Thus Trager and Smith relied heavily upon the results of American dialectology in their influential analysis of English (1957). These records represent the selected perceptions of naive informants rather than the more sophisticated judgments of the linguist, but they are none the less introspections. The methods of dialect geographers do not differ essentially from any other method of formal elicitation: the informant gives the dialectologist his opinion about what words he uses and how he says them. 9 Thus there are no fundamental differences in the data used by descriptive and generative linguists. Many generative linguists today are drawing heavily on the intuitions of speakers of other languages (e.g., Hale

9

Dialectologists do occasionally write down syntactic forms that an informa nt uses in the course of the discussion which are not the object of conscious elicitation, and in recent years, small samples of 'free conversation' have also been recorded in the field, though dialect maps or atlases have not yet drawn on such material.

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1973, Perlmutter & Oreznik 1973), and American dialectologists continue to use introspective evidence on their own dialect. From this general agreement of method, one might well conclude that there is no serious problem with the data used by our field, and a lack of concern with empirical foundations is well motivated by the uniformity of the phenomena. Many linguists believe that the areas of consensus are large enough to give us enough data for a general description of any one language, or for a theory of language in general. Indeed, Chomsky's original proposal was that we could solve problems caused by disagreement on the data by avoiding them altogether: by concentrating our arguments on 'clear cases' and letting the unclear cases be decided by their evidence (1957:14). I will refer to these clear cases as examples of 'invariant' linguistic behavior: though they begin as analyses of linguistic variation, this variation was either resolved into invariant rule or was left as free variation; these cases then fit the categorical view of language as a set of discrete, invariant categories common to the entire speech community.

Facts about Linguistic Variation From everything that has been said so far, it would seem that there can be very few facts about linguistic variation that have linguistic significance. Consider first the variation shown by a single speaker of the language. In terms of the categorical view, the output of his rule is either (a) in free variation with the input or (b) it is not: if (a) it makes no difference whether his rule applies or not at any given time; if (b) then his rule is categorical and always applies. In either case there is nothing further to be said. Attempts to describe conditioning factors which 'almost' determine a rule's output are usually taken as examples of incomplete analysis.10 Now consider variation between speakers: disagreement which would interfere with the consensus that we would hope to build on. If the differences were consistent enough to be taken seriously, then we would simply say that in this respect the speakers have different grammars, and fit the object of our description to the consistency of the data. Thus the task of analyzing variation may be put outside the sphere of linguistic analysis proper. Bloomfield did discuss some of the unresolved io Nevertheless, descriptive linguists frequently report such incomplete relations of more or less; see Labov 1971a for examples.

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variation he found in his data, in more detail than most of his students did. In his discussion of the Menomini short vowels, for example, he noted quite frankly that "the determination of the short vowels in the normal form is the greatest difficulty of Menomini phonetics" (1962:6). A close reading shows that some of this problem is due to vowel reduction ('slurring') and some due to sociolinguistic variation of the type that has been studied systematically in recent years ('surface fluctuations'). For example, in discussing the variation of /e/ and /e/, Bloomfield notes: "The higher variants which coincide with e seem to be favored in rapid speech..." (1962:10). In other cases of sociolinguistic variation in Menomini, Bloomfield tended to accept the prescriptive norms in the introspective judgments of the informants, and describes deviations from those norms as less skillful use of the language. Considering variation in the use of the Menomini proximate and obviate genders, he notes that the person identified as proximate can change from sentence to sentence; and that "one will hear a slightly clumsy and less urbane, but not unusual form which states the same occurrence without use of an obviate" (1962:40). In the wellknown "Literate and illiterate speech" (1927), Bloomfield compares 'good' and 'bad' connotations of English structures, which he generally rejects, with standards of good and bad speech among the Menomini, which he attributes to the use of certain forms by persons with "a cumulation of obvious superiorities, of both character and standing". In line with his general position on speech variation (see p. 82 above), Bloomfield made no attempt to analyze such variation by formal means. In Language, he dealt with the problem by dividing his discussion of linguistic change into chapters which dealt with categorical phenomena ("Phonetic change", "The comparative method") and those dealing with variable ones ("Fluctuation in forms", "Dialect geography"). The first set present systematic linguistic analyses, the second deal largely with external factors affecting language in an informal way. Students of Bloomfield gradually developed the notion of the idiolect to exclude variable phenomena, effectively narrowing the scope of their analysis to the speech of one person talking about one topic for a short time. 11 Generative grammarians have largely ignored the problem of variation, with a few notable exceptions12 and exclude all competing data 11

See Bloch 1948 for the most systematic exposition of this concept. Most notable being Guy Carden, whose work plays a major role in this and many other discussions of the problems of introspective judgments. 12

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except that drawn from their own 'dialect' : that is, their own judgments about sentences. The study of introspective judgments is thus effectively isolated from any contradiction from competing data. But frequent retreats to the idiolect have the bad consequence that each student of the general structure of language will then be confined to a different body of facts. 13 Such retreats thus represent a defeat for Saussure 's notion that langue is the general property of the speech community, and for Chomsky's program that we build a theory of language upon the 'clear cases'. We would hope that the differences between individual members of the speech community were confined to incidental and unimportant issues. Unfortunately, this hope has not been justified. The studies of introspective judgments carried out so far show that variation in this field is widespread, uncontrolled and chaotic. We can sum up these findings under three headings : 1. Wholesale rejection of linguists' judgments 2. Instability of idiolectal dialects 3. Contradictions between introspections and behavior Rather than review all of the work in this area, I will try to present one such finding of each type in detail, and refer the reader to other summaries in the literature.

2. PROBLEMS I N T H E USE OF INTROSPECTIVE J U D G M E N T S

2.1 Wholesale Rejection of Linguists' Judgments The first published indication that judgments of acceptability were unstable was the brief report on grammaticality tests made by Hill (1961). Hill's technique was criticized by Chomsky, who suggested that we might want to derive a scale of grammaticality (1961), but for the next decade there was almost no published work bearing on this problem.14 The few studies that have been reported have recorded a very 13

An observation made most cogently in Wald's monograph on the tense markers of Mombasa Swahili, a grammatical study based entirely on observation of the vernacular (1973). 14 Extensive investigations of acceptability judgments were carried out in England by Quirk and Svartvik (1966) and Greenbaum & Quirk (1970); these studies developed a number of other techniques for testing linguistic competence. But the material that was tested was not organized in a way that seemed immediately relevant to the questions raised in American syntactic theory.

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wide range of variation in responses, with considerable deviation from the judgments which linguists have made in published articles. In his 1970 text, Langendoen reported the responses of 46 secondaryschool teachers to a questionnaire on tag questions; responses to 91 sentences showed an extraordinary range of variation. Lehiste submitted the same list to 46 Estonian-English bilinguals, expecting to find that the younger bilinguals would be closer to Langendoen's native speakers; but she discovered to her surprise that the range of variation, even among older bilinguals, was no greater than that of the native speakers (1970). Lehiste concluded that her data presented a serious challenge to the notion that grammaticality can be determined by appeal to the native speaker's intuitive knowledge. Wedge & Ingemann (1971) submitted a similar test to 12 linguistics students and 32 naive informants. They found the same range of variation, with naive subjects deviating more widely from the English teachers than the linguistic students. They suggested however that much of this disagreement can be accounted for by a bi-modal distribution of response: teachers seemed to prefer formal responses, while the naive subjects preferred 'notional responses'. All of these results raise the question, what would happen if we submitted a sizeable sample of linguists' judgments on grammaticality to a general population ? The most systematic study of this type was carried out by Spencer (1973). She tested 150 sentences from syntactic studies by Perlmutter, Carlota Smith, Postal, Ross, Rosenbaum and R. Lakoff. There were 60 judges: 20 graduate students in linguistics, 20 other graduate students, and 20 people from the town of State College. Table 1 shows the number of sentences tested for each author; columns 2 and 3 show the number of sentences that failed to get agreement from the 40 naive subjects when the sentences were presented in random order, and when the sentences were presented in the fixed order of the original article; columns 4 and 5 show the disagreements of the non-naive graduate students in linguistics in both random and fixed order. 'Disagreement' means that on a four-point scale, fewer than half of the subjects recorded judgments on the positive half of the four-point scale of acceptability if the linguist accepted the sentence, or fewer than half recorded judgments on the negative half of the scale if he starred the sentence. The next column is headed "Some < 50% ": this is the number of sentences that failed to obtain agreement from at least one of the three sub-groups of 20 subjects. This was true for 40% of the 150 sentences. The last column shows the judgments that were disagreed with by all of the three sub-groups: 29 of the 150 were rejected decisively by this

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WILLIAM LABOV TABLE 1

Disagreements of Naive and Non-naive Subjects with Grammaticality Judgments of Six Linguists [from Spencer 1973] No. of sentences Perlmutter C. Smith Postal Ross Rosenbaum R. Lakofif

%

No. subjects

30 30 30 30 23 7 150

D I S A G R E E M E N T Non-naive Some Naive Random Fixed Random Fixed (2) 12 11 14 18

(1) = (2) 1 1 0 0

(1) < (2) 4 5 5 1

If we now turn to the New York City dialect speakers, we find a dramatic difference. Guy studied the -t, d deletion of six white workingclass New York City speakers;57 Table 4b shows that for all six, Q was higher than V. We thus conclude that for New York City white workingclass speakers, a following pause behaves like a consonant as far as -t, d deletion is concerned. This agrees with the findings for black speakers, and points to a startling and unexpected dialect difference between Philadelphia and New York City.

TABLE 4 b

Ordering of Following Consonant Constraints on -T, D Deletion for 6 New Yorkers Factor Factor (1) (2) Obstruent (K) vs. Liquid (U) Liquid (U) vs. Glide (G) Glide (G) vs. Vowel (V) Vowel (V) vs. Pause (Q)

(1) > (2) 2 4 5 0

(1) = (2) 2 0 0 0

(1) < (2) 2 2 1 6 [from Guy 1974]

This situation offers us considerable insight into the relationship between substantive explanation and linguistic generality. The basic -t, d constraints appear to be binding on all dialects, motivated by general phonetic and semantic principles. But when there is no clear linguistic motivation for one constraint or another predominating, we have the 57

These speakers were also included in the analysis of working-class New York City speech in LYS 1972.

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possibility of dialect differentiation. The Q factor illustrates very well the relation between the arbitrary aspect of linguistic structure and its substantively motivated aspect. In many cases we now know enough to predict where we can expect the greatest uniformity and where we can expect arbitrary variation. Finally, it may be noted that the study of variation offers us an unlimited body of data to resolve linguistic questions. Perhaps the least fruitful of the contributions of the second, generative phase of linguistic activity has been the notion that the theory is underdetermined by the data. The search for internal evaluation measures does not seem to have led to any positive result but rather brought about a generalized skepticism as to whether we can choose among the many theories which are generated over each small body of data. The study of variation offers us an unlimited body of new facts to resolve such issues. Among the many contributions of Guy's study is the demonstration that the more data we use, the clearer will be our ultimate resolution of the problem. Table 5 shows the relationship between the number of tokens and the distribution of expected orderings for two factor groups: M[onomorphemic], A[mbiguous] and P[ast], and the KUGVQ series we have just studied. When we have more than 35 tokens in the smaller of the two cells that we are comparing, we obtain perfectly consistent results; if our numbers drop below five, we see random results.58 Guy's discovery of the Q factor which separates New York City and Philadelphia raises a number of new questions, as we would expect from any significant discovery. We must now ask if there are any other phonetic features correlated with this difference, and how deep-seated is the rule which differentiates the two dialects. We can foresee a whole new series of studies which will illuminate our understanding of dialect differentiation on the one hand, and phonological feature theory on the other. The study of syntactic variation. It is not accidental that this discussion has presented the most difficult problems in variation of introspective judgments with examples drawn from syntax, and illustrated the progress made in the observation of speech with an example drawn from phonology. Emphasis on the advantages of quantitative analysis of large bodies of 58

Itshould also be noted that some relationships are stronger than others, and achieve regularity with a smaller number of tokens. Thus the original studies of -t, d deletion showed remarkable regularities even when the smaller cells had as few as three or four tokens; but here we were dealing with the M-P and K-V relationships which are the strongest and include a number of minor regularities which do not emerge so readily.

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Percentage Distribution of Expected Orderings in Philadelphia -T, D Deletion Number of tokens in smaller cell 0-5

6-15

16-35

Factor group

MAP KUGVQ

50% 56% N:

8

27

73%

85%

81%

80%

15 48

13 36

36+

100% 100% 9 31 [from Guy 1974]

data may seem to underline the difficulty of applying these methods to syntax. What grounds do we have for believing that Principle IV can apply to the unclear cases which can be found on any page of an introspective study of syntax ? It is true enough that none of the studies of syntactic variation have reached the depth of the studies of -t, d deletion. But a number of recent investigations of syntactic variation have opened up new ground, and shown that there is no practical or theoretical barrier to the exploration of syntactic phenomena. G. Sankoff's NWAYE paper was appropriately entitled, "Above and beyond phonology in variable rules" (1973); in this report she advanced the study of the development of the future particle bai in Melanesian Tok Pisin, and also the study of que deletion in Montreal French, in both cases building on earlier work with important results. Wald (1973) provided rich quantitative evidence on the relation between time reference and tense markers in Swahili. Labov (1972b) analyzed negative attraction and negative concord by quantitative techniques. G. Sankoff's most recent examination of the ia particle in Tok Pisin demonstrates the gradual development of a relative marker from a discourse marker (1975). But it must be admitted that these analyses rely upon syntactic phenomena which are relatively frequent. What about the syntactic constructions that might occur only once or twice in a two-hour conversation, or not at all ? Lavandera has made a frontal assault on this problem in her study of «'-clauses in Buenos Aires Spanish (1974). The verbs of such sentences show great variation: they may contain the imperfect subjunctive, the present, the conditional, or the future as well: Lavandera needed a very

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large body of data to analyze the sociolinguistic and grammatical factor that govern this variation. But how often do hypothetical clauses occur in spontaneous conversation? By developing conversational techniques which concentrated these forms, Lavandera was able to obtain 1489 examples of ^/-clauses from 90 subjects. This body of data was then large enough to be analyzed by the Cedergren/Sankoff program, with striking results.59 There are two basic routes to applying these techniques for the study of variation to less frequent syntactic forms. One is to enrich the data of natural speech, the technique followed by Lavandera. The other is to present the form to the subject in a conversational setting and obtain evidence on his semantic processing of the structure. Similar experimental techniques were illustrated in our examination of the NEG-Q and NEG-V dialects in section 2 above. But the various experiments carried out were still quite removed from spontaneous conversation: the subject was engaged in a test situation which may very well elicit reactions that are not typical of his normal processing of linguistic forms. Our ultimate aim would be to engage a person in conversation, extract the information we want, and conclude without the subject feeling that he has been the subject of an experiment at all. Such techniques of rapid and anonymous exchanges have been used for phonological variables (Labov 1972a: Ch. Ill); but to apply them to syntactic issues is a much more difficult matter. Yet 'difficult' is certainly not synonymous with 'impossible' or 'undesirable'. The final example that I will consider here demonstrates the application of experimental techniques to the problem of the meaning of the variation between got and be in passive constructions. The jay-walking experiment. The issue here concerns the alternation between two forms of the passive: (20) (a) I was arrested, (b) I got arrested. Do these mean the same ? Linguists and traditional grammarians have taken both sides of the question (Hasegawa 1968; Gee 1974). The OED outlines the range of semantic possibilities which seem to have existed at least since the 17th century: get, with passive pple: To cause or procure oneself to be treated in a certain way or to undergo a certain action; also in weaker sense, to come to be the 89

A complete analysis of this material is available in B. Lavandera 1975.

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object of a certain action. Often taking the place of be as a passive-forming auxiliary where a continuous state is not intended to be expressed. Thus we can conceive of two gets, one an auxiliary and the other a main verb. But some contend that the causal meaning is always present, though difficult to detect, and that get is never equivalent to be. Is the 'weaker sense' of the OED meant to be an exact equivalent of be, or is this a third meaning, intermediate between passive and causative? We obtain a wide range of all three reactions if we ask for the intuitive judgments about (20a) and (20b). As R. Lakoff has pointed out (1971), purpose clauses bring out the causative meaning of get quite sharply: (21) (a) I got arrested to prove a point, (b) I was arrested to prove a point. Does this mean that the causative meaning of get is also present in (20a) and (20b)? If we agree that (21a) has a different meaning and structure from (21b), then does this mean that (20a) has the same relation to (20b) ? It is a very common practice to bring out differences in meaning and structure by adding disambiguating material; if we cannot argue backwards from (21a) vs. (21b) to (20a) vs. (20b), then a great many other arguments must be thrown into doubt. But on the other hand, if we argue that (20a) and (20b) mean something different, there is an even stranger consequence. It is well known that the 'get-passive' is more colloquial than the ¿e-passive; in fact many people deny using it altogether. Though no systematic study has been made, there is reason to believe that its use is stylistically and socially stratified. Is it the case that people think more causally when they are talking more informally? The approach to a solution we will follow is to ask whether there is any difference in semantic interpretation when the get passive is used in place of the ¿e-passive in the course of ordinary conversation. To answer this question it is necessary to devise situations where the two different meanings are captured in the disambiguation of larger contexts, and that larger meaning held in view so that any small differences in meaning of get and be will be preserved and magnified through the course of a protracted exchange. And since the get passive is a social stereotype and all kinds of unrealistic attitudes cluster about it, this act of interpretation must take place without any conscious reflection about language. A non-reactive experiment was devised which seems to have all of the necessary properties. The subject is approached on a street corner or in

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any public place, and asked (1) if lie can help with a 'one question traffic survey'. Refusals to this request so far have been minimal. The experimenter continues: 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

"It's about cops and jay-walkers. This happened in Milwaukee, where it's a big issue. This man came to a corner. The light was against him. There was a cop on the corner. And there was no cars coming. And he crossed the street. And he got arrested. Do you think that was the right thing to do ?"

Notice that the referent of that in sentence 10 is determined by the complement of right thing-, that is, to do. Since the subject of this complement is deleted, it can refer to any action performed by any actor in a preceding sentence. Normally it will refer to the action carried out by the last available agent. If (9) "he got arrested' is equivalent to the passive 'he was arrested', then he is not an agent but a patient, and the underlying (deleted) agent is understood to be the cop, and the action is the arresting. If (8) 'he got arrested' is heard as a causative, equivalent to 'he got himself arrested,' then he is the agent; the normal way to refer to this situation is to say that 'the right thing to do' refers to 'crossing the street' in sentence (9). Sentence (10) was changed with each successive experiment to one of the following four forms: Symbol (a) He was arrested to test the law. WP (b) He was arrested. W (c) He got arrested. G (d) He got arrested to test the law. GP The experiment was carried out with 80 subjects in downtown Philadelphia; each was given one form of the test.60 When the semantic interpretation was not clear on the first reply, the interviewer probed with questions like "Why do you feel that way ?" In most cases, the semantic interpretation which the subject had made was immediately evident from his first answer: 60

I would like to acknowledge with thanks the assistance of Mark Baltin, Claudia Kawas, Nobuo Ogawa and Edith Weinstein in completing this experiment.

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... and he was arrested to test the law. Do you think that was the right thing to do ? No. If there's no cars coming, why shouldn't he be allowed to cross ? if he's not obstructing traffic. - Housewife, 21. ... and he got arrested to test the law. Do you think that was the right thing to do ? Legally, it's not, the right thing. I would probably do it myself... - Train operator, 46. Table 6 shows the results of this brief study. For the WP sentence, the overwhelming percentage of subjects interpreted 'right thing' to mean 'get arrested'; and for the GP sentences, 50% interpreted 'right thing' to mean 'cross the street', reflecting the causative meaning of get. So far the results agree with the disambiguation of get and be brought about by the purpose clause, in agreement with R. Lakoff's observations.61 But when we look at the two forms without purpose clauses, both show the same moderately low percentage of causative interpretation.

TABLE 6

Effect of Purpose Clause on get- and be- Passive in the Jay-walking Experiment Sentence (a) (b) (c) (d)

Condition Be 4- Purpose Clause Be Get Get + Purpose Clause

(WP) (W) (G) (GP)

Referent of Arrest him

'Right thing to do' Cross the street

18 20 20 13

3 6 7 13

The results of this experiment point towards two distinct modes of interpretation of get with past participles. With a purpose clause, the causative meaning appears to be strong; without a purpose clause, we do not detect any difference between get and be, and we would therefore regard the get and be passives as social variants. 61

Note that the situation is unsymmetrical in regard to the causative meaning. The replies of most subjects show that they have to refer back to sentence (8) in order to reply to the question with such a causative meaning: the "right thing to do" was "cross the street" rather than "get himself arrested". On the other hand, one had only to refer back to the immediately preceding sentence (9) for the passive meaning. The anaphoric situation therefore strongly disfavored the causative meaning; as Table 6 shows, this got only 50% in the most favorable GP context.

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This type of experiment has all of the properties that we looked for at the outset: the subject uses his linguistic competence without reflection or introspection, applying the rules of his grammar to the interpretation of sentences in a natural context. The experiment is controlled across populations though larger numbers are needed with this design than with one in which the same subject reacts to all four sentences. The Jay-walking experiment can therefore be taken as one example of an attack on a syntactic problem which goes beyond introspective judgments by examining semantic interpretation in a natural context. It does not seem to me impossible to develop such experiments for any type of syntactic question, whether we are investigating acceptability, ambiguities, or phrase structure. More ingenuity is needed than if we simply ask ourselves "Can I say this?" or "What do I think this means?" But it was never suggested at any phase of American linguistics (p. 99) that we continue to work indefinitely without forethought or ingenuity. These qualities are not alien to linguists: they are as much a part of our general competence as the ability to discover paradoxes of rule ordering.

4. LINGUISTICS AS A JOINT ENTERPRISE

This review of the empirical foundations of American linguistics has not done justice to many independent traditions of research which might be considered as models of sound procedure. I have not discussed developments in experimental phonetics or empirical work in specific areas such as African or South East Asian linguistics or the experimental techniques of psycholinguistics. My focus has been on the dominant approaches to the synchronic description of linguistic facts; in particular I have taken Bloomfield and Chomsky as spokesmen for the two major traditions in the development of American linguistics, and examined the stated principles and the practices of each. The review of the empirical foundations of the theory of language change undertaken by Weinreich, Herzog and myself (1968) had a different focus, a greater time depth, and a wider range. That paper emphasized the need for recognizing heterogeneity as a fundamental property of linguistic structures, since change is incomprehensible if we begin with and end with the search for homogeneous structures. It was also a more optimistic and less critical view, since it rested on the natural alliance between historical linguists, dialectologists, and sociolinguists. These three groups share an immediate concern with the

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real world in which language changes take place, and there is little disagreement among them about the nature of linguistic facts. My concern here has been to establish general principles that might serve as a basis for similar agreement on the nature of acceptable facts in synchronic investigations. There cannot be too much room for optimism in such a venture: ideological positions are too well established, and habits of work are too firmly set to believe that there will be an immediate convergence of thinking on these issues. In discussions of this topic at various universities, I have repeatedly been told that concern with reliability and validity of data is premature, that 'we are only forming hypotheses' for future generations to test. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to underestimate the strength of linguists' feeling for their discipline as a study of the world around them, their desire to rest their work on a firm foundation, and their hope that it may survive to influence others. I have no reason to think that most linguists are in fundamental disagreement on these points. The data and the arguments brought forward here will generally be accepted as far as they go; the problem is how observation and experiment are to relate to the intuitive data in the actual work of linguistic analysis. The four working principles suggested above may give us the basis for agreement in evaluating different kinds of data as linguistic facts; but when we consider the different temperaments and working styles of the linguists we know, it seems that it will not be easy to bring these facts into contact with each other. Let us consider a linguist who is temperamentally inclined towards introspection and discussion with a few close colleagues. He will have no difficulty in operating with Principle I: whenever he has no reason to think otherwise, he will continue to accept his introspections as characteristic of the language in general. When will he have reason to think otherwise? His close associates will seldom provide that reason: first, because it is no longer considered good form to question someone else's introspections, and second, because close associates tend to share the same judgments. If he encounters criticisms of his data at a general talk, he may be willing to accept Principle II and set his own judgments aside. But under what conditions will he take up the challenge implicit in Principle III, and do the work that would be necessary to discover the clear cases that may underlie this dispute? It is easier to think up new examples than to investigate patterns of introspective judgments or invent experiments to study semantic interpretations. It is probably not

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worth doing for the kinds of incidental data represented by sentences (6a-c). The introspective linguist would feel impelled to become involved in such a study only for the sake of facts which were critical enough to count both ways: prove him right if they are right, or prove him wrong if they are wrong. Conceivably, sentences such as (7) represent issues which would be worth proving in this sense, but it is not easy to locate many such examples in syntactic argumentation. Finally, what kinds of evidence would lead the introspective linguist to admit Principle IV, and take data on consistent patterns of speech as more valid than inconsistent patterns of introspections ? This is a common enough situation in phonology, where most people think they say [ksent] with four segments when in fact they say [kaet] with three. It is also possible to find many examples in discourse rules: very few people are able to recognize through introspection the form they most commonly use to say goodbye. 65 There are relatively few syntactic examples of investigations of user's introspection on hand, but cases such as the quantifier dialects and the positive anymore may be convincing. Note that the data for introspective judgments on NEG-Q and NEG-V dialects may not be consistent enough to allow a clear case under Principle III. But for anymore, we would recognize two clear cases on the basis of introspective judgments, anymore and non-anymore dialects - if the evidence cited from speech behavior did not supersede and lead us to posit a single clear case under Principle IV. Whether or not we can expect significant numbers of introspective linguists to accept evidence for Principle IV remains to be seen. Let us now consider a sociolinguist who studies variation in the speech community. This investigator will have no difficulty in accepting Principle IV: all the evidence demonstrates that the vernacular is more consistent than the more careful styles of speech, and that direct questioning gives the most erratic results. The sociolinguist may or may not be interested in carrying out studies of variation in introspective judgments under Principle III. Principle II is no problem at all, since the analyst's introspections have never been accepted as evidence in this line of work. But Principle I may be more difficult to accept; after so much evidence of the unreliability of introspective judgments, it may be hard for many sociolinguists to see why these judgments should be recognized at all. While they may concede that only a small proportion of the syntactic issues can be investigated by observation and experiment, they may not be willing 62

For some data on this problem, see Labov 1974b.

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to build upon a foundation which incorporates so many errors, some already exposed but many more not yet located. In this case too, we may get reluctant acceptance of the principles, but no inclination to apply them all in practice. We can easily predict the consequences of such recalcitrance: introspective linguists continuing to construct divergent models on the basis of non-existent idiolects; sociolinguists studying isolated cases of variation without any coherent grammar to place them in. It seems clear that we will need a commitment to convergent and cumulative methods which goes beyond the recognition of principles: I do not think it is a vital matter for any one linguist to change his way of working, or even practical to expect it: the crucial matter is the way in which the issues are presented to students entering the field. Many linguists recognize profound problems of unreliability in introspective judgments, but talk to their students as if these problems did not exist. Others take their recognition of the problems as a license to withdraw from the mainstream of linguistic activity and encourage their students to do the same. Both approaches seem to me equally irresponsible. If there is a moral issue in the business of doing linguistics, it is that we should struggle to avoid making our students the victims of our personal histories and limitations. It is not unreasonable to introduce students to the weaknesses of introspective judgments at the outset, explain why we continue to work with them, and encourage them to go beyond the limits of introspection whenever they find a linguistic fact important enough to warrant it. There are those who feel that this effort at convergence must fail, because there is no single linguistic reality that we can all observe. It is suggested that we have here two incommensurable 'paradigms'. This is a fashionable view, and the construction of such paradigms is a favorite occupation of those who would prefer to discuss the limits of knowledge rather than add to it. 63 There is a tendency to see linguistics as a kind of debating society, where the winner is awarded the privilege of not reading the papers of the losers, and re-writes the history of the field in favor of some more remote progenitor. But there is no reason that we cannot take a more serious and straightforward course: we can build directly upon the achievements of both periods of American linguistics, 63

Linguistics has been seen by some writers as an archetypical case of Kuhn's model. Kuhn believes that successive paradigms transform the world so that it is "incommensurable with the ones he had inhabited before" (1962:111). For a general review of this issue and its relation to other philosophies of science, see Phillips 1975.

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recognizing the defects of their empirical base, without losing the glimpse of formal structure that we have obtained. We can easily do the opposite: it is a simple matter to exploit the weaknesses of introspective linguistics and issue polemics that seem to disparage the entire enterprise. Given the evidence that is presented in the second part of this paper, one could easily create memorable slogans that would have a certain polemical impact, e.g., "the more people think about language, the more confused they become." But a careful examination of the data shows that this slogan might itself confuse the issues rather than clarify them. If we return to the case of positive anymore, we can readily see that introspective judgments are weak enough. We ultimately reached the stage where our informants' introspections told us nothing more about the state of the rule in the Philadelphia dialect. But note that we could not have reached that conclusion by observations alone. The first stage was to collect observations of the use of positive anymore in Philadelphia: that initiated the inquiry. The second stage was a study of introspective judgments, which showed us that Philadelphia contrasted sharply with the North and Coastal South in having at least 50% positive reactions to this rule. The third stage was to raise that percentage to 85-90% by more refined tests of semantic interpretation. The fourth stage was extended observation, which showed that a remarkable number of the residual cases eventually betrayed their knowledge of the rule through spontaneous use. The several hundred examples of positive anymore observed in spontaneous speech could never have brought us to this conclusion alone, without the systematic sampling of introspective judgments. 64 This seems a clear demonstration of the way data from observation, experiment and introspection can jointly be brought to bear on a linguistic problem of some subtlety. Several other results point in the same direction: that the facts are somewhat simpler and clearer than any body of data would make them look. For those who fear that the task of writing a grammar of English is receding from our reach, this should be an encouraging result of our first steps towards a unified procedure for assessing linguistic facts. There is certainly room enough for disagreement when we turn to the larger question of explaining these facts. Here we are faced with an even sharper opposition between formal and substantive approaches. 64

It is possible in fact that we can obtain results even closer to 100% positive response in the anymore dialect areas, as indicated by responses to recent sentences which embody the complaint condition and other conditions which favor this form.

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Again, both the first and second periods of American linguistics have much in common: the rejection of substantive explanations from phonetics, physiology, anthropology, sociology and semantics in favor of formal structural properties. In the last few years, there have been signs of a general turn away from such formalisms in favor of drawing substantive explanations from three major areas: (1) the physiological characteristics of the human organism; (2) the social use of language; and (3) what we know of cognitive processes.65 But efforts to unify our approach to explanation will not make much progress until we can jointly recognize a valid and reliable linguistic fact. The principles outlined here are submitted with the hope that they will be useful towards this end. University of Pennsylvania

REFERENCES Bach, Emmon, and Robert Harms (eds.). 1968. Universals in linguistic theory. New York: Holt. Baker, C. L. 1970. Notes on the description of English questions — the role of an abstract question morpheme. Foundations of Language 6. Baltin, Mark. To appear. Quantifier-negative interaction. New ways of analyzing variation in English, ed. by R. Shuy and R. Fasold. Bever, T. G., and D. T. Langendoen. 1971 A dynamic model of the evolution of language. Linguistic Inquiry 2.433-64. Bloch, Bernard. 1941. Phonemic overlapping. American Speech 16.278-84. —, 1948. A set of postulates for phonemic analysis. Language 24.3-46. Bloomfield, Leonard. 1926. A set of postulates for the science of language. Language 2.153-64. —, 1927. Literate and illiterate speech. American Speech 2.432-9. —, 1933. Language. New York: Holt. —, 1935. The stressed vowels of American English. Language 11.97-115. —, 1962. The Menomini language. New Haven: Yale University Press. —, 1927. On recent work in general linguistics. Modern Philology 25.211-30. Carden, Guy. 1970. A note on conflicting idiolects. Linguistic Inquiry 1.281-90. —, 1973a. Dialect variation and abstract syntax. Some new directions in linguistics, ed. by R. W. Shuy. Washington: Georgetown University Press. —, 1973b. English quantifiers: Logical structure and linguistic variation. Tokyo: Taishukan. —, 1973c. Disambiguation, favored readings, and variable rules. New ways of analyzing variation in English, ed. by C.-J. N. Bailey and R. W. Shuy. Washington: Georgetown University Press. —, 1975. Data for syntax and semantics: Replication results. Mimeographed. Cedergren, Henrietta, and David Sankoff. 1974. Variable rules: Performance as a statistical reflection of competence. Language 50.333-55. Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic structures. The Hague: Mouton. 65

For a clear statement of this position, see Lindblom 1972.

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—, 1961. Some methodological remarks on generative grammar. Word 17.219-39. —, 1964. The logical basis of linguistic theory. Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Linguists, ed. by H. Lunt, 914-1008. The Hague: Mouton. —, 1970. Remarks on nominalizations. Readings in transformational grammar, ed. by P. Rosenbaum and R. Jacobs. Waltham, Mass.: Ginn. —, 1972. Empirical issues in the theory of transformational grammar. Goals of linguistic theory, ed. by S. Peters. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall. —, 1973. Conditions on transformations. A festschrift for Morris Halle, ed. by S. Anderson and P. Kiparsky, 232-86. New York: Holt. Cofer, Thomas M. 1972. Linguistic variability in a Philadelphia speech community. Unpublished Ph. D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania. Elliott, Dale, Stanley Legum and Sandra Thompson. 1969. Syntactic variation as linguistic data, 5th Meeting Chicago Linguistic Society, 52-59. Fasold, Ralph. 1972. Tense marking in Black English. Arlington: Center for Applied Linguistics. Flanagan, James L. 1955. A difference limen for vowel formant frequency. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 27. Gee, James P. 1974. 'Get passive': On some constructions with 'get'. Mimeographed. Greenbaum, S. 1973. Informant elicitation of data on syntactic variation. Lingua 31.201-12. —, and Randolph Quirk. 1970. Elicitation experiments in English. London: Longmans. Greenberg, Joseph H. 1963. Universals of language. Cambridge: MIT Press. Grinder, John, and Paul Postal. 1971. Missing antecedents. Linguistic Inquiry 2.209312. Guy, Gregory R. 1974. Variation in the group and the individual: The case of final stop deletion. Pennsylvania Working Papers on Linguistic Change and Variation II, No. 4. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. Harris, Zellig. 1951. Structural linguistics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hasegawa, Kinsuke. 1968. The passive construction in English. Language 44.230-43. Heringer, James T. 1970. Research on quantifier-negative idiolects. Papers from the Sixth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 287-96. Hill, Archibald. 1961. Grammaticality. Word 17.1-10. Hindle, Donald. 1974. Syntactic variation in Philadelphia: Positive anymore. Pennsylvania Working Papers on Linguistic Change and Variation II, No. 5. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. Hockett, Charles F. 1948. Implications of Bloomfield's Algonquian studies. Language 24.117-31. —, 1958. A course in modern linguistics. New York: Macmillan. — (ed.), 1970. A Leonard Bloomfield anthology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Keenan, Edward. 1972. On semantically based grammar. Linguistic Inquiry 3. Kuhn, Thomas S. 1962. The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kurath, H. 1939. Handbook of the linguistic atlas of New England. Providence: ACLS. Labov, William. 1966. The social stratification of English in New York City. Washington: Center for Applied Linguistics. —, 1967. Some sources of reading problems for Negro speakers of non-standard English. New directions in elementary English, ed. by A. Frazier, 140-67. Champaign, 111.: National Council of Teachers of English. —, 1971a. Methodology. A survey of linguistic science, ed. by W. Dingwall, 412-97. College Park: University of Maryland Linguistics Program. —, 1971b. Some principles of linguistic methodology. Language in Society 1.97-120.

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—, 1972a. Sociolinguistic patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. —, 1972b. Language in the inner city. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. —, 1972c. Where do grammars stop? Georgetown Monograph on Languages and Linguistics, ed. by R. Shuy, 43-88. —, 1972d. For an end to the uncontrolled use of linguistic intuitions. Paper presented at the Linguistic Society of America meeting, Atlanta. —, 1974. Linguistic change as a form of communication. Human communication: Theoretical explorations, ed. by A. Silverstein. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. —, 1975. The quantitative study of linguistic structure. Proceedings of the Second International Conference of Nordic and General Linguistics, ed. by Karl-Hampus Dahlstedt. Umeä. —, Paul Cohen, and Clarence Robins. 1965. A preliminary study of the structure of English used by Negro and Puerto Rican speakers in New York City. Cooperative Research Project No. 3091. Washington: Office of Education. —, —, —, and John Lewis. 1968. A study of the non-standard English of Negro and Puerto Rican speakers in New York City. Philadelphia: U.S. Regional Survey. —, Malcah Yaeger, and Richard Steiner. 1972. A quantitative study of sound change in progress. Philadelphia: U.S. Regional Survey. Lakoff, G. 1973. Fuzzy grammar and the performance/competence terminology game. Meeting, Chicago Linguistic Society, 271-91. Lakoff, R. 1971. Passive resistance. Papers from the 7th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 149-62. Langendoen, D. Terence. 1970. Essentials of English grammar. New York: Holt. Lavandera, Beatriz R. 1975. Buenos Aires Spanish: Tense variation in ji'-clauses. Pennsylvania Working Papers on Linguistic Change and Variation, I, No. 4. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. —, To appear. A sociolinguistic investigation of syntactic variables in Buenos Aires: The use of the conditional in s/-clauses. Legum, Stanley. 1975. FWfe-clauses in English. Unpublished Ph. D. dissertation, University of Texas at Austin. —, Dale E. Elliott and Sandra A. Thompson. 1974. Considerations in the analysis of syntactic variation. Mimeographed. Lehiste, Use. 1970. Grammatical variability and the difference between native and non-native speakers. Working Papers in Linguistics 4, 85-94. Columbus: Ohio State University Computer and Information Science Center. Lindblom, Björn E. F. 1972. Phonetics and the description of language. Proceedings of the Seventh International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, ed. by A. Rigault and R. Charbonneau, 63-97. The Hague: Mouton. Nunberg, Geoffrey. 1974. A falsely reported merger in eighteenth century English. Pennsylvania Working Papers on Linguistic Change and Variation, I, No. 2. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. Perlmutter, D., and J. Oreznik. 1973. Language-particular rules and explanation in syntax. A festschrift for Morris Halle, ed. by S. Anderson and P. Kiparsky, 419-59. New York: Holt. Phillips, Derek L. 1975. Paradigms and incommensurability. Theory and Society 2.37-62. Postal, Paul. 1968. Cross-over constraints. Paper presented at the Winter 1968 meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, New York. Quirk, Randolph, and J. Svartvik. 1966. Investigating linguistic acceptability. The Hague: Mouton. Rickford, John R. To appear. Towards a coherent linguistic practice — the case of B.E. bin. Proceedings of the Second Annual Conference of New Ways of Analyzing Variation.

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Rosenthal, Robert. 1966. Experimenter effects in behavioral research. New York: Irvington. Ross, John R. 1972. Endstation Hauptwort: The category squish. Papers from the Eight Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 310-28. —, 1973. A fake N P squish. New ways of analyzing variation in English, ed. by C.-J. Bailey and R. Shuy. Washington: Georgetown University Press. Sankoff, David, and Pascale Rousseau. 1973. A method for assessing variable rule and implicational scale analyses of linguistic variation. Paper presented at International Conference on Computers in the Humanities, Minneapolis, July 1973. Sankoff, Gillian. 1973. Above and beyond phonology in variable rules. New ways of analyzing variation in English, ed. by C.-J. Bailey and R. Shuy, 44-61. Washington: Georgetown University Press. —, 1975. The origins of syntax in discourse: Some evidence from Tok Pisin. Paper presented at the International Conference on Pidgins and Creoles, Honolulu. Shuy, Roger W., Walter A. Wolfram and William K. Riley. 1968. Field techniques in an urban language study. Washington: Center for Applied Linguistics. Sledd, James H. 1966. Breaking, umlaut and the Southern drawl. Language 42.18-41. Spencer, Nancy J. 1973. Differences between linguists and non-linguists in intuitions of grammaticality-acceptability. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 2.83-98. Trager, George L. 1930. The pronunciation of 'short a ' in American Standard English. American Speech 5.396-400. —and Henry Lee Smith, Jr. 1957. An outline of English structure. Washington: ACLS. Trudgill, P. J. 1972. Sex, covert prestige and linguistic change in the urban British English. Language in Society 1.179-96. Wald, Benji V. 1973. Variation in the system of tense markers of Mombasa Swahili. Unpublished dissertation, Columbia University. Wedge, George, and Frances Ingemann. 1970. Tag questions, syntactic variables, and grammaticality. Papers from the Fifth Kansas Linguistics Conference, 166-203. Weinreich, Uriel, William Labov and Marvin Herzog. 1968. Empirical foundations for a theory of language change. Directions for historical linguistics, ed. by W. Lehmann and Y. Malkiel, 97-195. Austin: University of Texas Press. Wolfram, Walt. 1969. A sociolinguistic description of Detroit Negro speech. Washington: Center for Applied Linguistics.

THE FUTURE OF SEMANTICS CHARLES J. FILLMORE

ABSTRACT In this paper 1 I shall propose, with regrettable imprecision, a kind of relevance test for semantic theory; and then I shall identify and evaluate, in terms of this test, a number of problems and proposals in semantics which I believe stand a chance of getting clarified, resolved, or abandoned in the foreseeable future.

I believe that one way of evaluating results, approaches, and issues in semantics is to see in what way they can be taken as relevant to an understanding of the process by which people interpret texts in their language. Let me begin with an example of what I mean. I recently heard Herbert A. Simon discuss the different strategies that students use in understanding algebra problems that are presented in ordinary language — what school children know as word problems.2 There are some unrepresentative aspects to this kind of an interpretation task, to be sure, but I think it will allow us to sort out quite clearly certain stages of the comprehension process that I have in mind. A problem like the following one, according to Simon, was presented to students: A man cut a board into two pieces in such a way that one of the two pieces was two-thirds the length of the original board and furthermore it was four feet shorter than the other pieces. What was the length of the original board? There are three main strategies that students followed in interpreting this text. The first strategy was used by the kind of person I will call a 1

While preparing this paper, I profited from conversations with Francesco Antinucci, Glenn Ayres, Lily Wong Fillmore, Paul Kay, George Lakoff, Ronald Taylor, Frank Vlach, and Dorothea Weniger. 2 The example was given in a lecture on "Language understanding by humans and machines" given at the University of California in the spring of 1974.

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He understands what is claimed by each part of the text; he constructs an equation which expresses each of the given length relationships; he solves the equation; and he gives as his answer ' — 12 feet'. The second strategy is that of what I will call the EXACTING VISUALIZER. He, too, knows what each part of the text means, but as he reads the text he tries to construct an image - possibly a visual image but maybe just a set of coherent beliefs about a possible world - with which each part of the text is compatible. He finds that this can't be done: you can't have two boards, each one longer than the other. His conclusion is that the problem has no solution. The third strategy is that of what I will call the COOPERATING VISUALIZER. He is capable of understanding just as well as anybody else what is claimed in each part of the text, and he, too, tries to construct, in ways dictated by the text, an image of a situation. But he, possibly without even noticing that parts of his text are in conflict, finds it easier to believe that he is dealing with a real problem about a believable board than to believe either that a trick is being played on him, or that he is being asked to imagine a world in which objects can have negative extents. He assumes, possibly unconsciously, that the word 'longer' was intended where he found the word 'shorter', and he gives as his answer, '12 feet'. These three strategies differ from each other in important ways. All three of our typical students have to be able to understand each part of the text individually. The two visualizers match the text with their beliefs about what can possibly be the case; and the cooperative visualizer adjusts his interpretation of the text according to his assumptions about the nature of the communication situation. The strategies can be distinguished by imagining questions that the three might ask themselves about what the poser of the problem is doing. All three of them ask: 'What is he saying?'. The two visualizers ask: 'What is he talking about?'. The cooperative visualizer asks: 'What are his intentions ?'. I believe that the cooperative visualizer, the one who asks all three questions, exemplifies the most typical instance of text interpretation for natural language. A text induces its interpreter to construct an image, or maybe a set of alternative images.3 The image the interpreter creates NON-VISUALIZER.

3 I intend image to be understood generously; not limited to the notion of a visual image, yet more constrained than merely 'a set of consistent propositions characterizing some possible world'. Something more like: 'a set of properties of some imaginable situation'. I recognize the totally non-operational character of this description, but I trust it is a benign defect.

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early in the text guides his interpretation of successive portions of the text, and these in turn induce him to enrich or modify that image. While this image-construction and image-revision is going on, the interpreter is also trying to figure out what the creator of the text is doing - what the nature of the communicating situation is. And that, too, may have an influence on the image-creating process. In short, when someone interprets a text, he imagines a situation in which the things he is told about have the properties he is told they have or are doing the things he is told they are doing; and he tries to figure out the author's intentions in communicating these things to whoever his intended addressees are. A text can be said to be coherent if a single imagined world is compatible with all parts of the text; and if there is a more or less unified answer, covering the whole text, to questions about the speaker's or author's purpose. The claims I would like to make are these: first, that issues in semantics that have no conceivable application to the process of comprehension cannot be very important for semantic theory; and second, that some issues that might have looked like matters internal to semantic theory proper are actually best dealt with as aspects of the comprehension process. This view will seem to some people to be hopelessly mentalistic, but it should be remembered that I'm using it as a way of evaluating the significance of claims and positions in semantics, not as a way of doing semantics. One frequently raised issue in semantics is this: what is the difference between LINGUISTIC information about the meanings of words or sentences, and FACTUAL information about things and events? This is sometimes phrased as: What is the difference between a dictionary and an encyclopedia? The uncertain status of a sentence about an elephant with 80 legs worried Geoffrey Leech.4 What kind of knowledge enables a speaker of English to know that is an odd sentence ? Is it that he knows about elephants that each one has at most four legs, or is it that QUADRUPEDAL is one of the semantic components of the noun 'elephant' ? The question in other words, can be taken as part of the problem of determining the correct feature analysis of lexical items. Eugenio Coseriu would insist that systems of semantic features cannot be thought of as taxonomies of real-world things, and that taxonomies and terminologies are strictly outside of linguistic structure in the first 4

Geoffrey N. Leech (1969), Towards a semantic description of English (Longmans), p. 85.

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place. Accordingly, he would say that there is no lexical substructure to be word 'elephant' that could possibly be examined within semantic theory. 5 Saul Rripke would lead us to the same conclusion, though from a very different starting point. He would take the unity and uniqueness of natural kinds as somehow directly given by the world, and their naming as something analogous to the assignment of proper names.6 We recognize, from the whole gestalt, the member instances of a certain natural kind; and we give those things the name 'elephant' - or, rather, we accept the naming of those things that somebody before us has already provided. And it happens that each one of them has, not by definition but in fact, at most four legs. The cognitive anthropologists, on the other hand, would hold that the clearest and simplest cases of semantic structure are indeed taxonomies and that one of the most important contributions of semantic analysis is to show how the speakers of a language classify the elements of the world they live in.7 The answer to the elephant question, then, can't be given independently of such an analysis. If it turns out that the lexical system of the language has a clear category for four-footed animals, if the structure of the system shows that the noun 'elephant' is clearly a hyponym of that category, then quadrupedality can be taken as one of the semantic properties of the word 'elephant'. There is a way of viewing taxonomizing which still allows us to say that the oddity of a sentence about an 80-legged elephant is not to be accounted for within semantic theory. The discovery of lexical structure and the description of taxonomies are different sorts of intellectual activities, and we should not find ourselves trapped in a notation or in a method of testing empirical claims - such as the bizarreness test - which would not be sensitive to that distinction. Leech comes to the same conclusion, of course, but in a way dictated by HIS notation : he ends up having to number all natural kind names.8 I wonder if general knowledge of a sixty-five-year-old classification of word systems might have been of some help in the formulation of these 5

Eugenio Coseriu (1966), "Structure lexicale et enseignement du vocabulaire", Actes du premier colloque international de linguistique appliquée, Nancy (Annales de l'Est, Mémoire No. 31), pp. 175-217. 6 Saul A. Kripke (1972), "Naming and necessity", in Donald Davidson and Gilbert Harman, Semantics of natural language (Reidel), pp. 253-355, esp. pp. 314-23. 7 For a representative study, see Harold C. Conklin (1962), "Lexicographic treatment of folk taxonomies", in F. W. Householder and Sol Saporta, Problems in lexicography, Indiana University; reprinted in Stephen A. Tyler (ed.), Cognitive anthropology (Holt, Rinehart and Winston), 1969, pp. 41-59. 8 Leech, op. cit., p. 87.

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questions - or, rather, might have prevented the formulation of certain pseudo-questions. R. M. Meyer, 1910, distinguished three kinds of lexical systems, referring to them as natürlich, künstlich and halbkünstlich natural, artificial, and semi-artificial. Names of plant and animal species are natural; names of military ranks are artificial; complex words, like those in the vocabulary of hunting, are semi-artificial. Words in the natural or artificial sets can be grouped or arranged, but cannot be further analyzed; only the complex words, only words in the semi-artificial systems, can be said to have any internal structure.9 Dwight Bolinger has made componentialists aware of some of these distinctions.10 But it might have been useful when linguists began to formalize systems of semantic features if they had kept open the possibility that some lexical items do, some do not, lend themselves to discretefeature analysis. The feature analysis approach cannot easily be applied to the semantics of words like 'real' and 'imitation'. If something is described correctly as 'imitation coffee', the imagined world the interpreter creates has a history. It contains some substance that has many of the properties of coffee, but it lacks one criterial property: it is not made from coffee beans. A brute force semantic feature approach would assign the word 'coffee' some possibly large number of peripheral features and at least one criterial feature, so that the phrase 'imitation coffee' could differ from it in lacking just the criterial features. This solution, of course, cannot do. There is no reason in the world to give a semantic analysis to 'coffee' — beyond whatever is necessary to link the name of the drink to the name of the bean. The process of comprehending sentences containing the phrase 'imitation coffee' requires that one imagine a world in which something that resembles coffee was made out of something other than coffee beans. That act of imagination involves MAINLY memories of experience, only MINIMALLY the kind of knowledge that could be called linguistic knowledge. Another group of issues in semantic theory centers around these questions: What do we do with the words that ARE decomposable? What are the semantic features that combine to express word meanings ? How can we know when we've got the correct feature description or paraphrase description of a lexical item? What does it MEAN to have 9

R. M. Meyer (1910), "Bedeutungssysteme", cited in Horst Geckeier (1971), Strukturelle Semantik und Wortfeldtheorie (Wilhelm Fink), p. 87. 10 Dwight Bolinger (1965), "The atomization of meaning", in Language 41.555-73; see his distinction between constructive and substantive definitions, p. 568.

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the correct set of features ? What kind of a claim could such a claim be ? Is it a claim about linguistic structure that is independent of what people know? Is it a testable claim ABOUT what people know? Or what? A linguistic paradigm is a pleasing thing, but I wonder whether the constructibility of a neatly balanced paradigm can be taken as an argument for anything in semantics. Many essays in lexical semantics begin with an analysis of livestock terms based on Lamb's extension of an example of Hjelmslev's. In one version, the system makes critical use of three sexes - Male, Female, and Neuter - exemplified by such triplets as 'bull', 'cow', and 'steer'. 11 This classification puts the words into the right groups, to be sure; but nothing is contributed to our understanding of the comprehension process by having available a static three-way sex categorization, with 'steer', 'gelding', and 'barrow' as members of the neuter sex. Everyone who knows what a steer is knows that a steer is a disabled male. The imagined world the interpreter creates for 'steer' is a world which has a history in which the beast in question got castrated at an age early enough for the trauma to have affected its growth in particular ways. The argument might be made, of course, that at the level of LINGUISTIC structure there is this three-way sex classification, and that it is the apparatus of INTERPRETATION IN A MODEL which provides the castrationhistory account. This may be true, but I can't imagine any arguments that could be made in its favor. Given Robbins Burling's survey of the enormous number of possible alternative feature descriptions of the members of even very small vocabulary fields,12 it would seem a very vacuous undertaking indeed to try to justify the superiority of one analysis over another on any grounds other than the straightforwardness of its relation to the comprehension process. One semanticist who does want semantic analysis to be maximally faithful to conceptual structure is Anna Wierzbicka.13 Criticizing the usual balanced-paradigm approach to kinship semantics, she proposes an analysis which comprises a kind of sex-education manual. Giving 11

See, for example, the introduction to Tyler, op. cit., p. 9, which was based on Sydney Lamb (1964), "The sememic approach to structural semantics", American Anthropologist 66 Part 2 N o . 3, 57-78; which was based, in turn, on Louis Hjelmslev (1943), Prolegomena to a theory of language, Francis L. Whitfield translation, University of Wisconsin, 1961, p. 70. 12 Robbins Burling (1964), "Cognition and componential analysis: God's truth or hocus-pocus?", American Anthropologist 66.20-28; reprinted in Tyler, op. cit., 419-28. 13 Anna Wierzbicka (1972), Semantic primitives (Athenäum); chapter 2, "Sex, generation, kinship", pp. 34-56.

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her kind of analysis to a central core of concepts in kinship semantics - namely: father, mother, male, female, and parent - we might take childbearing as the most primitive concept, defining 'mother' in its terms : A is B's mother if A gave birth to B. Slightly more complex is impregnating, having to do with an essential act in enabling somebody to bear a child, allowing us to define 'father' in its terms. The notion 'female', then, is defined as having a body that is designed in such a way as to be in principle capable of childbearing; and 'male' is defined as having a body that is in principle capable of impregnation. 'Parent' in such a system is 'mother or father'. The typical analysis, by which 'mother' is defined as 'female parent' and 'father' as 'male parent', regards the three terms 'male', 'female', and 'parent' as primitives, 'mother' and 'father' as complex terms in the system, and equally complex at that. By the analysis I've suggested, based on Wierzbicka, the simplest word in the set is 'mother', 'parent' the most complex, if we use feature-count or length of definition as the measure. Because of its initial plausibility as a presentation of the conceptual prerequisite relationships among the lexical items concerned, proposers of alternative analyses ought to accompany their proposals with good reasons for accepting them. In this last discussion I touched on the notion of conceptual or cognitive complexity. Another frequently discussed issue in semantics is the relationship between semantic feature descriptions and psychological measures of complexity. For many people, it has been appealing to think of the relative length or complexity of a semantic description as being predictive of some such measure of psychological complexity as relative learnability; but faith in such predictions is not generally rewarded. George Miller's analysis of motion verbs in English seems to suggest, for that vocabulary field, that the words with the most detailed semantic feature description appear to be learned earlier than the formally simpler ones: 'climb' is technically more complex than 'ascend', but seems to be easier; 'lift' is technically more complex than 'raise', but again, seems to be easier.14 Taxonomies provide examples that go in both directions: 'dog' seems simpler than 'mammal', of which it is a hyponym; but simpler, too, than 'retriever', a hyponym of it. In short, from knowing only the formal relationships of semantic features in a taxonomy, we can make no reliable predictions about cognitive complexity. We need to know 14

George A. Miller (1972), "English verbs of motion: A case study in semantics and lexical memory", in Arthur W. Melton and Edwin Martin, Coding processes and human memory (V. H. Winston & Sons).

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which of the features in the structure of a complex word, or which of the categories in a taxonomy, are instances of abstraction of the kind found in scientific discourse, and which are genuine instances of folk classification. It may be that this is not a useful distinction; but it can hardly even be raised in a theory that commits itself prematurely to a particular form of notation. Now a claim that, say, the Wierzbicka analysis of 'father' is the correct one should not be taken as a claim that whenever somebody comprehends a sentence like 'That's John's father' he fills in his imagined world for the text which contains that sentence a history of intimacies between that man and John's mother. We are able to do that, of course, if we are interpreting the sentence 'That man is John's REAL father'. But the fact that we don't have to do that is related to another phenomenon of lexical semantics, and that is that when our language provides a lexical item based on one criterion, the lexical item serves a classificatory function, so that knowledge we may have about the roles or properties of the things classified become a part of our comprehension of texts containing the classifying word. We know about fathers that they typically perform a nurturing role of a particular kind in the nuclear family in our culture, so the image-forming process has that to draw on, too. In fact, it is that classificatory aspect of the word 'father' that becomes criterial in the formation of new compounds like 'step-father' and 'adoptive father'. Questions of taxonomies and the semantic structure of words lead us naturally to the various notions of semantic fields.15 The aspect of semantic field theory which gave it its greatest initial appeal was the mosaic or jig-saw-puzzle metaphor, the idea that the meanings of the words in a semantic field filled up all the space in that field, the theory that no one term in a field could be defined or understood independently of all the others. This is a case where the test of relevance to the comprehension process shows the IMPORTANCE of the claim, but where common sense assumptions about the nature of comprehension give strong a priori reasons to doubt the TRUTH of the claim. If the theory were true, for each word that can be seen as a member of one or more semantic fields, we would have to believe that comprehending that word requires access to the entire array of words in each field to which it belongs. One of the unwel15 For a critical survey of proposals within the semantic field theory, see Geckeler, op. cit.

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come parts of the theory is its relativism, since we would be forced to describe comparable comprehension experiences in different languages in ways that reflected their differently structured field properties; and it is hard to imagine non-circular ways of doing that. Probably nobody believes in a strong version of the field theory today. To be sure, there are word groups in which one cannot really be said to understand one of them without understanding the other(s) - such as the pair 'familiar' and 'strange' - but (1) the mosaic analogy is not very illuminating for such vocabulary sets, (2) the conceptual interdependence would exist even if one of the meanings were manifested only by a phrase, not by a single word, and (3) it is surely possible to know one of these words without knowing the other. The field theory is incompatible with any theory of language universals, and it is incompatible with the notion of accidental gaps in lexical semantics. There is a strong tradition of semantic field research - now without the mosaic hypothesis - especially for the vocabulary of French, German, and English, and some of the most interesting collections of semantic data available are found in the finely detailed analyses of words for noises, emotions, light emission, facial expression, body movements, speed, etc., that have been carried on, for example, by the students of Eugenio Coseriu and Ernst Leisi.16 These scholars have shown something of the variety of parameters along which word meanings can vary. Since Leisi's work has been deliberately focused on words whose content concerns physically observable entities and events, his findings are particularly relevant to the imagery aspects of comprehension, even in fairly narrow notions of imagery. Traditionally one of the most important issues in the theory of word meaning is, of course, the nature of definition. Indeed, it is frequently assumed that the act of defining a word and the act of giving a semantic description of a word are identical. The questions that surround the notion of definition include: whether there is a clear line between definable and non-definable words, and whether for the definable words there is a distinction between those concepts which are made available to the language user through their definitions and those which must be apprehended independently of their definition. An important two-way distinction between types of definitions is that between stipulating definitions and characterizing definitions. For stipulating definitions, the definer himself decides the appropriateness relation 16

For bibliographies, see the references in Geckeler, op. cit., and references on p. 113f in Ernst Leisi (1973), Praxis der englischen Semantik (Carl Winter).

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between the word and its application. In the system of kinship semantics used by some anthropologists, the word 'nibling' is defined to mean 'child of sibling', that is 'nephew or niece'.17 Stipulating definitions provide the only clear cases of things being true by definition. Notice how pointless it would be to criticize this definition on the grounds that it fails to capture the meaning of 'nibling' in its full richness. 'Nibling' means what the anthropologist says it means, and there is nothing more to say. Characterizing definitions are definitions given for words that people generally come to know independently of knowing their definitions. For one tradition the goal is to capture the essential properties of some intuitively already known substance or process or class of things, to find some collection of conditions that are both uniquely and importantly connected with what it is that is being defined. The usual definitions of 'man' or 'language' are of this kind. A second tradition for the characterizing definition is what might be called the litmus-paper tradition. Here the attempt is to find some (possibly quite uninteresting) fact or condition that is uniquely true of what is being defined. Examples are the definitions of 'left' and 'right'. Some dictionaries make use of the location of the heart, some make use of the fact that most people are righthanded, others make use of the points of the compass - defining 'left', for example, as the side of a body facing west when the body faces north. These definitions enable a person to know which side of his body is the left side and which is the right side if he has access to the information these definitions call for; but of course they are not analyses of the notions. A third tradition for characterizing definitions is the attempt to capture the criterial properties by which people decide when one word rather than another should be used. Field theorists, prototype theorists, 18 and componentialists in general tend to fall into this third group. Only characterizing definitions of this third type can make any contributions to the comprehension process, and that only if the criteria proposed for them can be converted in a straightforward way into descriptions of worlds or situations. 17

The term was first proposed by Samuel Martin, first used in print — in 1951 — by Harold Conklin (Conklin, personal communication). 18 Studies in what might be called prototype semantics include Brent Berlin and Paul Kay (1969), Basic color terms: Their universality and evolution (University of California); William Labov (1973), "The boundaries of words and their meanings", in C.-J. Bailey and Roger W. Shuy, New ways of analyzing variation in English (Georgetown University), pp. 340-73; and Eleanor Rosch (1973), "On the internal structure of perceptual and semantic categories", in T. M. Moore, Cognitive development and the acquisition of language (Academic Press).

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This cannot mean that we have discovered the only true format for definitions. It is of extreme importance for semantic theory to inquire whether there are words that permit only litmus-paper definitions. 'Left' and 'right' are the clearest candidates for that status. The comprehension process for these words requires, not that the interpreter understands the semantic structure of the words, but that he has a history in which he somehow simply came to know, in his own body, left from right, and that he now knows how to use these orienting words from the point of view of objects other than his own body. Somewhat like the case of 'left' and 'right', but somewhat different, too, is the case of words that name private experiences, like, for example, 'heartburn'. It's not easy for me to see how one ought to define, or how one can come to understand, a word like 'heartburn'. This condition is presumably a specific kind of internal event in the human body, and in that case there must be some correct technical description of it. But as the name of an internal experience, I personally do not know what the word 'heartburn' means, and what's more, I don't know how to find out what it means. When I ask people about the word, I get very different descriptions. I have no way of knowing whether the variety of descriptions that I get means that different people use the word to name different experiences, or whether all users of the word use it to name comparable experiences but lack the ability to describe what it is that happens to them when they suffer this condition. The only even potentially useful suggestions I've received have taken the form of restaurant recommendations. But even if I try out the food in the recommended restaurant, I can't be sure which of the experiences I enjoy afterwards corresponds to heartburn, if any. In the case of heartburn, the description of events by means of which one can acquire the experience is not, in anybody's theory of meaning, a satisfactory semantic description of the word that names the experience. But there may be certain classes of words for which such descriptions are in fact the most direct ways of presenting their meanings. This might be true, for example, of certain kinds of emotion verbs. In Wierzbicka's analysis for English19 and in Yordanskaya's analysis for Russian emotion words, 20 a large part of the description takes the form; 'how you feel when such-and-such happens'. In Yordanskaya's case, a few extra 19

Wierzbicka, op. cit., chapter 3, "Emotions", pp. 57-70. L. N. Iordanskaya (1974), "Tentative lexicographic definitions for a group of Russian words denoting emotions", in V. Hu. Rozencvejg, Machine translation and applied linguistics, Linguistische Forschungen 17 (Athenaion), pp. 87-117. 20

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parameters of positive vs. negative affect, intensity, degree of external display, etc., are included. Paraphrasing Wierzbicka's analysis, 'disappointment' is 'how you feel when you wanted something to happen and had reasons to believe that it would happen but at the time you expected it to happen, it didn't happen'. 21 There are two possible ways of looking at such a definition. One is to assume that we are dealing with some specific inner experience whose true quality neither linguistics nor the science of psychology is yet able to characterize, and so, lacking anything better, we resort to describing situations capable of inducing that experiencing, trusting in the uniformity of human responses for the right label to get assigned to the right emotion. Another, I think more attractive view, is that emotion words do not necessarily sort out different qualities of inner experiences, but frequently relate emotional experiences to their histories or contexts. The issue, then, is whether the situation-descriptions that can be given for certain types of emotion words is or is not different in principle from defining 'heartburn' as 'how you feel after you have had three raw onions and a large coke'. The reason I regard them as different is that in the case of the emotion words the predisposing conditions are describable in general and noncircular terms. A stipulating definition is a definition that itself determines the conditions under which a word is appropriately used. Certain sorts of technical terms have only stipulated definitions, such as the kinship scholar's 'nibling' mentioned earlier. Sometimes a stipulated definition is an auxiliary operational definition of some antecedently understood but unserviceably vague word. Movie theaters and airline companies, for example, have their own operational definitions of 'adult'. The ability to make stipulated definitions of this sort is an important aspect of the functioning of a language, to be sure; but in such cases the word being operationally defined is clearly eliminable in favor of some new technical term, and the content of the operational definitions themselves are only of marginal interest to a theory of semantics. There are other cases when a word has simultaneously an ordinarylanguage meaning and an operational definition, both being appropriate and both being intended. The rules of a game or contest provide operational definitions for 'winning', a different one for each game, in fact; yet necessarily present in all of these is some notion like 'being in the most favored position when the outcome of the game is determined'. 21

Wierzbicka, op. cit., p. 62.

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It's important to realize that it doesn't quite make sense to say the word is AMBIGUOUS either between its ordinary meaning and its operational definition, or between one operational definition and another. These questions about the nature of definition lead to the general issue of the role of the lexicon, as part of a grammar, in the comprehension process. The central issue is: how much of the process of comprehending a text can be seen as knowing, and bringing to bear, facts about lexical items ? Not many years ago I was convinced that the lexicon contained essentially all of the information that was called on in the processing of a sentence, that it was the only part of a grammar whose properties were well-determined, and that the lexicon above all was capable of investigation in an essentially theory-neutral way. My position required the assumption that lexical information was a part of one's general linguistic competence and somehow occupied that part of one's memory that was reserved for purely linguistic facts, whereas information about things occupied a different and more general part of memory. John Macnamara has raised questions about the validity of this view of the composition of memory; he has argued that if there is no reason to believe that when we learn a word we place certain criterial properties of the word in one part of our memory and we store memories of experiences associated with the word in another part, there can be no reason to maintain a difference between linguistic and encyclopedic information. 22 I've touched on this question already, but now I wish to discuss a slightly different aspect of it. Every practical dictionary offers numerous instances of definitions that could not possibly be thought of as naming criterial properties of the notions defined: I have in mind such things as the extinctness of the dodo bird and the fabulousness of the unicorn. The dodo is an extinct bird, the dictionary tells us; but clearly extinctness cannot be a criterial property of dodo birds, because then it would be impossible to believe that there ever were any; and, of course, if there never were any, we would have no authority to say of them now that they are extinct. We learn from the dictionary that the unicorn is a fabulous beast; but if fabulousness is a criterial property of unicorns, it could make no sense to talk about people who in ignorance or madness believe that there really are, or really were, unicorns. We are not saying of such people that they believe that there are, or were, fables about unicorns, because that, after all, is not such an irrational belief. 22

John Macnamara (1971), "Parsimony and the lexicon", Language 47.359-74.

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Although many things are defined according to their function, a theory of comprehension needs to call on information about the appearance as well as the function of a thing. To return to the words 'real' and 'imitation', we know that it is possible for a real gun to look like a shoebox or a bugle; but an imitation gun cannot look like a shoe-box or a bugle. It has to look like atypical gun. The collection of objects designated by the word 'gun' is determined by a particular use and effect which a gun must have; it happens that most of the real objects we are familiar with that satisfy the conditions of gunhood have a more or less typical shape. The collection of objects capable of being designated by the phrase 'imitation gun' is determined by their having superficial resemblance to those most typical guns. It is obvious, then, that the semantic descriptions of the words 'imitation' and 'gun' cannot together, for the construction 'imitation gun', determine, without other information, the nature of the things designatable by that phrase. Another type of lexical information relevant to sentence interpretation is the combinatory potential of given lexical items. A strong position that I once wanted to take was that sentence semantics - everything but the rhetorical part - is entirely constructive from lexical information, by which I meant information associated with actual surface words. From knowing everything about words, including their valence or combinatory potentials, we can in principle (I thought) figure out everything we need to know about sentences. The position is similar to that of the German and Russian valence theorists and some versions of dependency grammar.23 Simplified a little, the view is that every sentence has a key word; the sentence is interpreted by knowing the valence or combining properties of that key word, by finding the constituents that satisfy these valence conditions, by finding the key word in each of these constituents, by knowing their valence properties, and so on. This view certainly matches the dreams of a student trying to read a passage of text in a language he imperfectly knows. It would be extremely helpful to have a complete valence dictionary for guiding oneself unerringly through a text. First you find the central governing word in the sentence - possibly a subordinating conjunction. You look up its meaning and its valence description, noting that it requires, say, an indicative clause and a subjunctive clause. You find the key-word in each of these, look up their 23

See the long introductory chapter ("Einführung in die Valenztheorie") in Gerhard Helbig and Wolfgang Schenkel (1973), Wörterbuch zur Valenz und Distribution deutscher Verben (Verlag Enzyklopädie), pp. 11-92.

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valence conditions, and proceed by tracing the dependencies until the sentence has been completely analyzed. Since each entry contains some semantic principle as well as a valence description, the exercise leads to a full semantic analysis of the sentence. The development of such a dictionary was a long-term dream project of mine. My contributions to case grammar were made with something like that in mind. A few years ago Helbig and Schenkel and their colleagues at Leipzig came out with a limited valence description of German verbs; 24 it is something which ought to be useful to students since its material was chosen largely on the basis of mistakes frequently made by foreign speakers of German. The dictionary is a fine achievement, as far as it goes, and the long introduction is a very informative survey of valence research; but of course it's far from the grand magical book of my dreams. I am convinced that the goal I had in mind cannot be achieved, at least not for English. No analysis of the valence of surface verbs can completely explain the structure of clauses containing those verbs. One sentence that will quickly prove my point is Leonard Talmy's example: 'She wore a green dress to the party.' 25 The phrase 'to the party' cannot be usefully thought of as one of the complements of the verb 'wear'; and I think very few people would try to rescue the claim by suggesting that in this sentence 'wear' is functioning as a motion verb. The sentence means something like, 'She went to the party wearing the green dress', the single-clause sentence being created by some sort of a conflation or amalgamation of the two clauses. It seems clear to me, in short, that a theory of sentence comprehension cannot be built exclusively on a study of the valence properties of lexical items; a person's knowledge of meaning cannot be exhaustively described as his knowledge of the meanings of words. So we must go beyond words. One set of semantic issues that is extremely important for sentence interpretation but is also highly capable of generating confusion is what might be called the rhetorical organization of a text. The vocabulary of this sub-field of semantics includes emphasis, topic, comment, theme, rheme, focus, presupposition, background, foreground, given, new, information structure, functional sentence perspective, communicative dynamism, and topic/comment 24

Ibid. For numerous examples of sentences needing 'conflational' interpretations, see Leonard Talmy (1973), Semantic structures in English and Atsugewi, University of California Ph. D . Dissertation (Berkeley). 25

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articulation, these last three being imports from Czechoslovakia.26 Confusions about these issues begin with questions of whether they belong to the field of semantics at all, whether there really is a distinction that these notions seem to require between cognitive meaning and other sorts of meaning, and whether the practitioners of this sort of analysis have a communicable methodology. Aspects of language related to the rhetorical organization include definiteness, anaphora, emphasis, and tense. All of these depend on subtle sorts of judgments about what the speaker assumes the hearer already knows, what the speaker assumes the hearer needs to know, and so on. The recognition of these assumptions is an important part of discovering the coherence of a text, and hence should play an important role in the process of language comprehension. Whatever reservations one might have about the state of the theory, the goals and the subject matter surely make it pass our significance test. To interpret a text we need to know the meanings of its constituent words, we need to know the combinatory properties of those words, we need to know syntactic principles of sentence construction, and we need to be sensitive to the manner in which the information is being offered to us. A much discussed structural feature that must also be detected is the set of scope relationships in a sentence. Observations of scope and scope differences are frequently used to support specific conclusions about lexical structure and about the nature of the correct semantic representations of given sentences.27 For some of these arguments the conclusion, I believe, is not justified. Some scope arguments have syntactic solutions; others have solutions involving the topic/comment articulation. For one type of argument, the scope observations appear to be explainable by scope relationships that exist in the underlying sentence before clause conflation. In a sentence like, 'He went upstairs for an hour', it is clear that 'for an hour' cannot have 'he went upstairs' in its scope. But we may not have to conclude from that that therefore 'went' in the sentence is 'derived from' something like 'caused himself to be' or 'changed location so that he was', or whatever. Another possibility 26

For a recent statement of some of the Czech school positions, see Petr Sgall, Eva Hajiiova and Eva BeneSova (1973), Topic, focus and generative semantics (Scriptor). 27 See McCawley's report of an observation of Jerry Morgan's in James D. McCawley (1968), "Lexical insertion in a transformational grammar with deep structure", in Papers from the Fourth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (University of Chicago Linguistics Department), pp. 71-79; fn. 2, p. 79.

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is that we have here an instance of clause conflation from something like, 'He went upstairs and stayed there for an hour.' By itself, of course, an undescribed grammatical process of clause conflation pulled out of the hat cannot be held up as an improvement over the doctrine of the adverb taking within its scope a part of the lexical structure of a single word. But if from sentences like, 'He read the Times all the way to Chicago' or 'He whistled into the room' or 'She wore a green dress to the party' the lexical decomposition route is clearly ruled out, we should be willing to rule it out in this case too, in favor of whatever kind of solution we eventually come up with for these last sentences. A second type of scope problem is one whose solution is a matter of topic/comment articulation. Most arguments about the scope of surface negation are like that, I believe. The negation in the sentence 'He didn't walk to the park' can have in its scope, we might be told, either (1) the entire clause, (2) just the manner component of 'walk', or (3) just the part about him going to the park. In the one case, I'm denying that he walked to the park; in the second case I'm denying that his travel to the park was achieved by walking; and in the third case I'm denying that his walking led him to the PARK. It might be better to admit that, in the semantic representation of this sentence, what is being denied is the entire clause in each of its three renderings. That is, it is being asserted that he did not by walking move himself to the park. The truth of that denial is compatible with the event of his walking elsewhere, or with the event of his getting to the park by some other means. The intuitions that led to beliefs about scope differences really have to do with which antecedent beliefs one is free to have while asserting this sentence, and how having one or another of these beliefs determines the suprasegmental rendering of the sentence. The conclusion about the necessarily complex analysis of 'walk to the park' stands unassailed, of course; but the reasoning that the semantic representations needed for the three ways of using this sentence must show three different ways of displaying the scope of 'not', is not valid. Scope arguments with 'because', 'not', 'almost', and 'may' also seem to be of the sort that permit reanalysis in terms of the topic/comment articulation. There are some scope arguments for lexical structure which DO seem to work on their own. Arguments with 'again' are like that. 28 Arguments about internal 'not' are like that - such as the argument that 'forbid' 28

See James D. McCawley (1973), Grammar and meaning (Taishukan), p. 348.

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is 'require not'. How otherwise, the argument convincingly goes, do we find the scope of 'until Friday', in a sentence like 'I forbid you to leave until Friday?'. 29 This ability to discover the topic/comment structure of a sentence is one of the abilities an interpreter needs to make use of when interpreting a text. Many of the decisions he makes about such structure are made while processing a text in time. We are led thus to a consideration of text semantics in general. One of the interpreter's tasks in comprehending a text is determining what the speaker's or author's coherence principles are. 30 The possibilities are numerous. One possibility is that successive sentences in a text give different information about the same object or situation. Another is that events are mentioned in the order of their occurrence. Another is that the information given in a sequence of sentences accumulates as reasons leading up to some conclusion. The concept of textual coherence principles combines with various aspects of pragmatics in the explanation of certain kinds of text-semantic phenomena for which the interpreter needs to do a little extra work in figuring out the author's intentions. I am thinking of metaphors, puns, and indirect speech acts. It has sometimes been believed that the contribution which semantic theory can make to the theory of the metaphor is in providing a formal way of identifying anomalous sentences. The belief is that most metaphors, or at least those concerning which something precise can be said, begin as semantically odd sentences.31 One problem with this view, of course, is that it is difficult to find a way of distinguishing anomalous sentences that are merely senseless from those which are capable of being given a metaphoric interpretation. Another is that many instances of metaphoric language do not fit this model. The conditions for metaphor, looked at from the point of view of somebody trying to comprehend what is being said to him, seem to be these: A says something to B. Because of the coherence principle which 29

This argument was suggested to me by Francesco Antinucci. For a discussion of some conditions of coherence for texts, see Teun van Dijk (1973), Some aspects of text grammars (Mouton). 31 There may be nobody who holds quite the views I described; but I have heard much discussion of metaphor that begins with the remark about selectionally deviant sentences being interpretable metaphorically found in Noam Chomsky (1965), Aspects of the theory of syntax (M.I.T.), p. 149. 30

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is guiding B in the interpretation of this portion of the text, or perhaps because what A said does not make literal sense, B concludes that A didn't literally mean what he said. Their communication is of the kind which allows B to believe that A expects B to figure out what A is trying to say. B does this, if he can, either by consulting some convention provided by his culture, or by considering some properties of or beliefs about the things or situations A has identified, and seeing what analogies are possible between the properties of what A mentioned and the imagined world B is constructing as he's processing A's text. It is not my purpose to discuss the activity of working out these analogies.32 It is the other, the pragmatic, sorts of decisions that interest me. For my illustrations let me ignore frozen or idiomatic metaphors, as well as metaphors which communicate things that cannot be easily expressed non-metaphorically, as with spatial metaphors for time and spatial metaphors for the structure of the mind. Let me consider instead creative metaphors - metaphoric ways of saying things that could possibly not with the same effect - be said in some other way. The first step in interpreting a creative metaphor, then, is that of figuring out that the speaker didn't mean what he said. We reach such a conclusion in one of several ways: perhaps the words he used don't allow a single coherent image (these are the cases of semantic anomaly); or perhaps we believe we are reading or hearing about the real world, and the image we would need for interpreting the passage literally is one which we feel does not fit the properties of the real world; or perhaps the image we would create for the passage does not fit the coherence principle by means of which the text is capable of making sense, of having a point. An illustration of this last possibility is found in a recent paper on metaphor. The author talks in one sentence about the recent history of linguistics and in the next sentence about towers collapsing and castles standing in ruins. 33 Looked at separately, there is nothing at all seman32

But for a discussion of this topic, see Paul Henle (1958), "Metaphor", chapter 7 of Paul Henle (ed.), Language, thought and culture (University of Michigan). 33 This paper was written at a time when I was away from my books. The paper I had in mind was Michael Reddy (1969), "A semantic approach to metaphor", printed in the Papers from the Fifth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (University of Chicago Linguistics Department), pp. 240-251. The passage which I had misremembered actually says: "We have attacked and destroyed the walls and the very foundations of a castle, and yet somehow left its battlements and fragile towers hovering undisturbed above the wreckage." The second clause, which I had

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tically odd about the castle sentences. It's just that, by assuming thematic unity, we find it easier to believe that we are reading about linguistic theories here too than to believe that the author has suddenly, for no purpose, changed the subject. We assume that he is talking about theories that once looked enduring and no longer do. Apparent violation of an assumed coherence principle is one pragmatic condition for the achievement of a creative metaphor; another is that the conversation or communication act setting must be one in which the speaker has the right to give the hearer the task of figuring out something that could have been said in some simpler way. In settings with highly limited conversational topic expectations, or in settings in which extremely urgent information needs to get transmitted, metaphoric language is inappropriate. If I am entering a crowded movie theater and I say to the ticket taker, 'The hounds of spring are on winter's traces', he is much more likely to believe that I am crazy than that I am celebrating with him the melting of the snow outdoors. Sometimes, going back to the semantic anomaly case, we know that some expression is not intended literally because the requirements of the words in the expression are not mutually satisfiable. In such a case, it might be meaningful to ask which word is part of the framework and which word is out of place. We might ask that of the words 'computers' and 'honest' in a sentence like 'Computers are honest'. With one answer to this question, a discussion of the metaphor would have us talking about an unusual use of a WORD; with another answer to the question, we would have to be talking about an unusual way of looking at some OBJECTS. What is unusual, in short, is either our use of the word 'honest' or our way of thinking about computers. The mere observation of the confrontation of the two words in a predication relationship, with their incompatibility predicted from semantic information, is not sufficient for characterizing the metaphor. Now it's sometimes thought that the construal principles used in the interpretation of metaphor involve the application of semantic features that are independently known to be part of the semantic description of one or both of the out-of-place words in a semantically anomalous construc-

forgotten and yet which is essential to the point of Reddy's metaphor, would give a question-begging quality to my remark that "there is nothing at all semantically odd about the castle sentences". Instead of taking time to find a more accurate illustration of my point, I ask the reader to pretend that there is an article on metaphor which has the properties I discussed.

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tion. 34 I think that view is generally wrong. More typically, the interpretation of a metaphor calls on beliefs about the things or situations depicted, rather than on knowledge of the semantic properties of words. A decisive instance of that is the metaphoric use of the word 'dodo'. If I refer to some person or institution as a dodo, you know that it is the extinctness of the dodo that I have in mind; but as we have seen, extinctness cannot be a genuine semantic feature of the noun. The interpretation of metaphor is just ONE of the comprehension processes by which the interpreter performs an extra analytic act the speaker sets up for him. Another trivial type is the pun. A more interesting and important type is the indirect speech act, the means by which somebody performs one speech act while producing a sentence capable of expressing a different speech act — as when one makes a statement by asking a question, or gives a command by making a statement. Formal analyses of these processes, of the type John Searle35 or George Lakoff and David Gordon 36 have proposed, emphasize such conditions as whether the addressee is reminded, or is induced to believe, that the conditions for the intended speech act obtain. These are paradigmatic analyses and should give way, I think, in some cases at least, to syntagmatic analyses. Many people typically precede directive utterances by explanations or justifications, as in the two-sentence sequence: 'Your nose is dirty. Go wash your face.' A coherence principle that such a person's interlocutors will quickly acquire is that those of his statements which do not fit some previously established text coherence principle are probably going to lead to some sort of request. If it's easy to figure out what that ultimate request is, the last part of the text doesn't need to be spoken. The first part, plus the coherence principle, added to the hearer's knowledge of the speaker's general expectations, are what determine the interpretation. In short, I would prefer not to say that IN TELLING ME that my nose was dirty she asked me to wash my face, but rather that AS SOON AS SHE TOLD ME that my nose was dirty, I was able to figure out what she had in mind. The issues I have been discussing are issues the nature and importance 34

This appears to be what is required for the operation of the Construal Rules suggested in Uriel Weinreich (1964), "Explorations in semantic theory", in Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Current trends in linguistics, III: Theoretical foundations (Mouton), pp. 395-478. 35 John Searle (1974), "Indirect speech acts", unpublished MS. 36 David Gordon and George Lakoff (1971), "Conversational Postulates", Papers from the Seventh Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society (University of Chicago Linguistics Department).

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of which can be determined, I would like to believe, by investigating their relevance to some projected theory of language comprehension. The test is unsatisfactory because it cannot literally be carried out: there is no theory of language comprehension, and if there were it still might not be obvious how we could relate specific questions in semantics to it. In short, I've been asking you to be cooperative visualizers. The topic I was assigned for this symposium was "The future of semantics". I must turn to that now. For the remote future, I have very good news. In the great, distant future, psychology, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, and logic or the descendants of those disciplines - will unite to provide a coherent, intelligible theory of language comprehension. This theory will serve to make possible a unity of beliefs, methodologies, and accepted results, and a single view of the expressive and communicative functioning of language, behind which scholars of many disciplines and with varied purposes and interests will stand united. Logicians, rhetors, literary critics, dictionary-makers, language teachers, sociolinguists, field linguists, translators, theoretical linguists, workers in artificial intelligence, and advertising copy writers, will all have a shared paradigm and they will all find that it does for them what they want it to do. Now as for the nearer future, the future that we are likely to witness ourselves, my predictions are not so cheerful. We have to face the reality that the scholars working with semantics are separated by country, language, university, discipline, subject matter, doctrine, and temperament. It's frankly hard to see how the Utopian unity of the remote future can get started. Getting people to talk to each other may not help, because the set of people who are really doing semantics may not be identical with the set of people who claim to be doing semantics. You've heard the story about the blind scholars and the elephant. One of the blind men had his hands on the elephant's tail, one on his trunk, one on his belly, one on a tusk, one on a leg, and so on. They held a conference on the properties of the elephant, and they couldn't agree. I don't believe that story. If these were really rational men talking seriously to each other about their experiences, there's no reason why they couldn't have come up with a perfectly adequate and coherent, if incomplete, description of what that elephant was like. What REALLY happened — and this, I think, DOES explain their inability to agree — was that, although many of the participants in this conference were holding on to parts of the elephant, one had his hands on a rose

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bush, one in a water fountain, and one on a wagon wheel, two were feeling each other, and several were examining their own heads. Of course there was no way of getting a unified account out of all their descriptions. I would like to think of the relevance-to-comprehension test I've been proposing as a way of figuring out which of us has been in contact with the Elephant. University of California,

Berkeley

QUESTIONS OF FORM A N D INTERPRETATION NOAM CHOMSKY

ABSTRACT Two of the central issues in the theory of grammar have to do with the independence of grammar (with regard to other systems of knowledge and belief) and the independence of syntax (with regard to semantics). This article surveys some of the questions that arise, as they have been treated during the 50-year period since the formation of the Linguistic Society of America in 1924. Jespersen's account of these topics, as outlined in 1924, is discussed. For roughly the first half of this history, his questions and concerns had little impact. In the past 25 years they have been a major topic of investigation in American linguistics. Several versions of an 'autonomy thesis' for syntax are discussed, in the context of a restatement, in somewhat different terms, of Jespersen's thesis on these matters. It is argued that Jespersen's thesis, so understood, remains quite plausible, and that a somewhat sharper version withstands criticisms that might be thought to apply.

The goal of this Golden Anniversary Symposium is to determine 'where we are at' in the several domains of linguistic inquiry. I think it may be useful to begin by asking 'where we were' 50 years ago with regard to the problems that I would like to survey briefly this evening. In the year of the founding of the Linguistic Society of America, Otto Jespersen published an original and provocative investigation of these problems.1 His point of departure was a version of the Aristotelian dictum that speech is sound production "accompanied by an act of imagination, for voice is a sound with a meaning".2 For Jespersen, "the essence of language is human activity - activity on the part of one individual to make himself understood by another, and activity on the part of that other to understand what was in the mind of the first". Each linguistic phenomenon "may be regarded ... either from the out1

Otto Jespersen, The Philosophy of Grammar (George Allen & Unwin, London, 1924). For perceptive discussion of this and related work of Jespersen's, in a context relevant to the present discussion, see Audrey L. Reynolds, "What did Otto Jespersen say?", Papers of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 1971. 2 De Anima, 420 b ; The Basic Works of Aristotle, Richard McKeon, ed. (Random House, 1941).

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ward form or from the inner meaning". Phonetics describes "the world of sounds", outward form; "the world of ideas" is the domain of a "sound psychology", which "should assist us in understanding what is going on in the mind of speakers", and a "sane logic", which deals with the "notional categories" that may in principle receive linguistic expression. The grammar is concerned with the "connecting link" between these two worlds. The central concern of the grammarian is free creation, and at a deeper level, the problem of how the structures of grammar "come into existence in the mind of a speaker" who is not taught grammatical rules "and yet, without any grammatical instruction, from innumerable sentences heard and understood ... will abstract some notion of their structure which is definite enough to guide him in framing sentences of his own .. .". 3 This "notion of structure" is to be captured in the linguist's grammar and dictionary, the former dealing with "the general facts of language" and the latter, with "special facts".4 Given the concern for "free expressions", the central domain of grammar is syntax, which deals with grammatical categories and their "role and employment in speech." It is "the grammarian's task in each case to investigate the relation between the notional and the syntactic categories", to determine the notional categories "in so far as they find grammatical expression, and to investigate the mutual relation of these two 'worlds' in various languages". "Syntactic categories thus, Janus-like, face both ways, towards form, and towards notion." The principle of investigation that Jespersen advocates is that "we should recognize in the syntax of any language only such categories as have found in that language formal expression", taking formal expression in a very wide, sense, including form-words and word-position. I assume that he would have felt comfortable with 'covert categories', in Whorf's 3

For Jespersen, it is an unconscious 'notion of structure' that 'guides' the speaker. Others have taken exception to this view. Quine argues that it is an 'enigmatic doctrine', perhaps pure 'folly', and that we may speak of 'guiding' only when rules are consciously applied to 'cause' behavior. Otherwise, we may speak only of behavior as fitting one or another system of weakly equivalent grammars, that is, grammars that generate the same set of sentences. See his "Methodological reflections o n current linguistic theory," in Donald Davidson and Gilbert Harman, eds., Semantics of Natural Language (Reidel, 1972). Others have taken a similar position. For a discussion, and a defense of Jespersen's notion, see my "Problems and mysteries in the study of human language," in A. Kasher, ed., Festschrift for Yehoshua Bar-Hillel (forthcoming). 4 In addition to grammar and dictionary, the linguist will be concerned with still another domain, "the theory of the significations of words," but Jespersen asks to be "excused if 1 leave [this domain] out of consideration in this volume".

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sense. But "in thus making form the supreme criterion", we must "look at the language as a whole" and not be misled by departures from general patterns. The method is to proceed from "notion or inner meaning", then "examining how each of the fundamental ideas common to all mankind is expressed in various languages, thus proceeding through ... function ... to ... form". Jespersen is concerned with categories of particular languages and their use, but also with the further question: ... are these categories purely logical categories, or are they merely linguistic categories? If the former, then it is evident that they are universal ... if the latter, then they, or at any rate some of them, are peculiar to one or more languages as distinct from the rest. He considers the view of John Stuart Mill that grammar is simply "the most elementary part of Logic" and that its principles and rules "are the means by which the forms of language are made to correspond with the universal forms of thought" so that "the structure of every sentence is a lesson in logic" (Mill 1867). He notes that such ideas are generally rejected by philologists and linguists, who tend to the opinion that "grammatical categories have nothing to do with the real relations of things in themselves". Jespersen asks: "Can there be such a thing as a universal (or general) grammar?" He points out that "no one ever dreamed of a universal morphology", because the specific features of particular languages were too obvious. It is only with regard to syntax that people have been inclined to think that there must be something in common to all human speech, something immediately based on the nature of human thought, in other words on logic, and therefore exalted above the accidental forms of expression found in this or that particular language. It is our ignorance of syntax that makes plausible the belief that grammar is nothing but applied logic. Jespersen seems to be suggesting that if we investigate syntax more deeply we will find structures that are independent of the nature of human thought (though related to it, in that they give it expression) and that vary among languages (while observing important general principles). Jespersen's own view of the matter is subtle and complex, and I think, generally persuasive. In investigating the "two 'worlds'" of thought and expression, we find systematic links between them, though "often enough we shall find that grammatical categories are at best symptoms, fore-

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shadowings of notional categories, and sometimes the 'notion' behind a grammatical phenomenon is as elusive as Kant's ding an sich". "The correspondence between external and grammatical categories is ... never complete, and we find the most curious and unexpected overlappings and intersections everywhere." Thus the English preterit has various forms and its 'logical purport' may range over such notions as past time, unreality in present time, future time, shifted present, and all times. We may discover a systematic theory of the forms and of the notions, and significant relations between the two theories, but the system of forms will not be simply a projection of the system of notions, and languages will vary in their categories of expression. Similarly, many languages have a subjunctive mood, but "it would be perfectly impossible to give a definition ... as would at the same time cover its employment in all the languages mentioned".5 Again, the system of forms will have its dependent structure, related to 'the world of ideas' though not simply a projection of it, and we will also expect to find (and do find) variety among languages in the expression of this 'notion', within the limits of universal grammar. Universal grammar is, therefore, possible. It will study such concepts as 'preterit', 'irrealis', 'subjunctive', and so on, but will not succeed in providing us with language-independent definitions of the categories of syntax solely in these terms. "On the whole we must not expect to arrive at a 'universal grammar' in the sense of the old philosophical grammarians," who took the system of grammatical categories to be simply a reflection of immutable notional categories. Rather, "what we obtain is the nearest approach to [universal grammar] that modern linguistic science will allow". The specific concern of the grammarian is to determine the nature of the abstract "connecting link between the world of sounds and the world of ideas", keeping to the "actual 5

Jespersen also holds that it is "impossible to give such a definition of the subjunctive in any of these languages as would assist us in deciding where to use it and where to use the indicative". I do not understand exactly what he means by this, or why he holds this view. The arguments he gives do not relate to it, so far as I can see. His discussion of the subjunctive and its expression seems to presuppose that there is a general notion of 'subjunctive' relating to 'the world of ideas', and if a grammar tells us how this notion is expressed in some language, then it would seem that we do have a 'definition' that "would assist us in deciding where to use it". 6 This does not seem to me an entirely fair rendition of traditional universal grammar. Consider, for example, the discussion of the 'rule of Vaugelas' in the Port-Royal Grammar and the subsequent tradition, which was concerned with aspects of form specific to French. For some discussion, see my Cartesian Linguistics (Harper and Row, 1966).

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linguistic facts ... recognized by the speech-instinct of [each] community or nation". He must determine how a particular language solves the problem of connecting the worlds of sound and thought, and at a deeper level of analysis, he must seek to establish the general principles that govern these abstract systems. He must attempt to unearth "the great principles underlying the grammars of all languages". Jespersen hopes that his "preliminary sketch" will assist his successors in "gaining a deeper insight into the innermost nature of human language and of human thought". Ideas of this sort were not characteristic of the American linguistics of the period, but they were not entirely unfamiliar. Sapir had argued that an examination of a range of languages would convince us that the 'part of speech' reflects not so much our intuitive analysis of reality as our ability to compose that reality into a variety of formal patterns. A part of speech outside of the limitations of syntactic form is but a will o' the wisp. For this reason no logical scheme of the parts of speech - their number, nature, and necessary confines - is of the slightest interest to the linguist. Each language has its own scheme. Everything depends on the formal demarcations which it recognizes.7 Nevertheless, Sapir added, "we must not be too destructive". Such basic notions as "something to talk about" and "something ... said about this subject of discourse" are of such "fundamental importance" that we expect to find formal counterparts in the vast majority of languages. But Sapir was not willing to commit himself to the enterprise of universal grammar much beyond this. Jespersen's observations on the relation of the system of grammar to notional categories can be illustrated with examples more central to logic than those he chose. Consider the various means for expressing something like universal quantification in English. 8 The means are quite varied, as in Jespersen's examples. Among them are the various quantifier 7

Edward Sapir, Language (Harcourt, Brace, 1921; Harvest, 1949), p. 118-19. On the extraordinary richness of the system of quantification in natural language, see Jaakko Hintikka, "Quantifiers vs. Quantification Theory," Linguistic Inquiry, Spring 1974; Dov M. Gabbay and J.M.E. Moravcsik, "Branching quantifiers, English, and Montague-grammar," forthcoming in Theoretical Linguistics. The latter paper notes that there may be "an interesting asymmetry between the semantic and syntactic components, namely the set of valid sentences is not r.e. [recursively enumerable] while the set of well-formed sentences is recursive". Hintikka notes that the significant sets and relations (analytic sentences, synonymous pairs) in a system of branching quantifiers are not recursive, and concludes that "the methodology on which much recent work [in natural language semantics] has been based is bound to be inadequate in principle", for this reason. The conclusion seems to me stronger than the argument warrants. It is not obvious that an approach such as that of Jerrold Katz, which Hintikka cites, requires that the sets in question be recursive. 8

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words (all, each, every, any), each with its special semantic and syntactic peculiarities;9 the definite determiner ('the lights are out'), 'bare' plurality Cbooks have covers'). Furthermore, a single formal device may have multiple interpretations, again as in Jespersen's examples. In saying 'beavers are mammals', we are speaking of all beavers, but not when we say 'beavers built this dam'. The sentence 'the citizens of England are demoralized by the economic crisis', taken literally, means that each is demoralized, though we may use it properly when we take the assertion to be only generally true. 10 But in the sentence 'the citizens of England constitute a remarkably cohesive social group', the same phrase, 'the citizens of England', attributes no property to particular members of the class denoted. When we say 'the citizens of England voted to join the Common Market', we do not imply that each citizen voted to do so; nor do we mean that only some did. Rather, a majority of some subclass so voted. Similar problems arise in the case of indefinite generics. The sentence 'beavers build dams' does not imply that each beaver built a dam, or even that many do (perhaps most beavers are in zoos). But there is a universal quantifier over the subject lurking somewhere in the interpretation (under normal intonation), as we can see by comparing 'beavers build dams' with 'dams are built by beavers'. The former states that all beavers are dam-builders, whether they exercise this capacity or not. The latter says nothing about all beavers, and the former says nothing about all dams. 'Beavers build dams' is true, even if most never have, but 'dams are built by beavers', under its natural interpretation, is false, since some are not. 11 Matters are still more complex when we attend to the use of plural noun phrases in predicates. Thus to have living parents and to have a living parent are quite different properties. If John has living parents, both are alive, but not necessarily if he has a living parent. It is true of 9

These are partially uncorrelated. Thus 'each' and 'every' differ markedly in their syntactic behavior, but do not seem semantically different. For discussion, citing the contrary view of Vendler, see A. Kroch, The Semantics of Scope in English, Ph.D. dissertation, M.I.T. (1974). 10 In contrast, such sentences as 'the lights are out' require that each light is out (in the understood set). 11 The same examples show the relevance of surface structure to meaning. Thus 'beavers build dams', with normal intonation, is not a statement about all dams. The situation is more complex. Consider: 'beavers, on occasion, build dams'; 'dams, on occasion, are built by beavers'. Actual interpretation in performance also involves extra-grammatical factors. See below, p. 174. For some comments on related matters, see John Lawler, "Generic to a fault," Chicago Linguistic Society, 1972; "Tracking the generic toad," ibid., 1973.

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each unicycle that it has a wheel, but n o t that it has wheels. 1 2 But the expressions 'have living parents', 'have wheels', may have the sense of the corresponding singulars or their 'inherent sense', depending on the means by which the subject noun phrase expresses quantification. Compare 'the boys have living parents', 'unicycles have wheels', 'each b o y has living parents', 'each unicycle has wheels'. In the first two cases, plurality is, in a sense, a semantic property of the sentence rather than the individual noun phrases in which it is formally expressed. 'Unicycles have wheels' means that each unicycle has a wheel, and is thus true, though 'each unicycle has wheels' is false. 1 3 In these relatively simple examples, it seems possible to give an organized and systematic account of the syntax of the relevant expressions in terms of reasonably well-motivated principles of grammar, and the same may be true of the set of 'readings' or correlates in some logic. But it seems plain that the syntactic structures are n o t a projection o f the semantics, and that the relation between 'the world of ideas' and the syntactic system is fairly intricate. A s the 'plural sentences' show, even a principle of compositionality is suspect. Global properties of the sentence, which may be quite involved, 1 4 seem t o play a role. W e cannot simply 12 Nor is it 'simply false'. Consider the truth values of 'a unicycle has wheels', 'a unicycle doesn't have wheels'. Problems of truth for natural language can be complicated. Cf. Austin's discussion of such sentences as 'Belfast is north of London', 'the galaxy is the shape of a fried egg', etc., in his "Truth," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume xxiv (1950), reprinted in J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock, eds., J. L. Austin: Philosophical Papers (Oxford, 1961). Consider the conditions under which the statement that New York is 200 miles from Boston (another Austinian example) would be true or false. Or, to take a case that has been recently discussed, consider 'the temperature is falling'. The notion 'temperature' seems best analyzed as a function on times, places, and things. Thus 'the temperature is 90°' does not mean 'temperature = 90°', where 'temperature' refers to some entity, but rather something like: 'temperature (now, here) = 90°'. Then 'the temperature is falling' means that temperature is a decreasing function through some interval. What interval? Compare 'the temperature is falling; a new ice age is on its way' and 'the temperature is falling; evening is approaching'. For truth, it suffices for the function to be generally decreasing, in some sense, through the relevant interval. If I mean that a new ice age is on the way, my statement that the temperature is falling may be true even if the temperature is, at the moment, rising. It is an interesting and useful idea to regard some aspect of meaning as a function from index sets onto truth and entities referred to; cf. David Lewis, "General semantics," in Davidson and Harman, op. cit. But to approach adequacy, the 'index sets' will have to be far more intricate and complex than any that have so far been contemplated, though even the more limited inquiry has led to intriguing results. 13 Cf. Kroch, op. cit., for an interesting discussion of such cases. 14 Compare 'unicycles are believed to have wheels', 'unicycles are believed to have been believed to have wheels', 'conveyances have wheels in certain primitive societies', etc.

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assign a meaning to the subject and a meaning to the predicate (or to a sentence form with a variable standing for the subject), and then combine the two. Rather, the meaning assigned to each phrase depends on the form of the phrase with which it is paired. The examples of setreference versus multiple denotation 15 illustrate the same, quite general point. Examples of this sort lend plausibility to Jespersen's conception of the relation of expression to content. I think that the program that Jespersen outlined for linguistic theory in 1924 has a great deal of merit, though it was, perhaps, premature. In any event, it found little resonance during roughly the first half of the history of the Linguistic Society of America. Linguists were concerned more with the "actual linguistic facts ... recognized by the speech-instinct of [each] community or nation", and sometimes went so far as to deny the possibility in principle of a more general investigation of universal grammar, reflecting the skepticism that Sapir expressed in 1921. But the work of this period, both in linguistics and in logic, did lay the groundwork for a return to Jespersen's program, and his problems have become a major topic of investigation in the second half of this history. Suppose that we recast Jespersen's project in the following terms. A 'linguistic theory' is a system of concepts drawn from all of Jespersen's domains: the concepts of phonetics, from the domain of 'outward form'; such notions as 'subjunctive', 'irrealis', 'implies', 'synonymous', 'meaningful', and other notions pertaining to the 'world of thought' and the 'broader-minded logic' that must be constructed (Jespersen suggested) to describe accurately the world of thought as expressed in the forms of language, and also concepts that suffice for the 'theory of the significations of words', which Jespersen omitted from his inquiry (see note 4); and finally, those theoretical concepts in terms of which we characterize the 'notion of structure' that serves as a 'connecting link' and the processes and properties peculiar to it, such concepts as 'subject', 'verb', 'phonological unit', 'grammatical transformation', and the like. The goal of linguistic theory is to interrelate these concepts as densely as possible by general principles of 'universal grammar'. In the best case, some of these concepts can be taken as primitive and others defined in terms of them, with other principles serving as axioms of the theory. Each primitive notion should ideally be assigned a set of tests and criteria 15

In the sense of R. M. Martin, Truth and Denotation (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1958).

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for applying it to data. Taking seriously the task of explaining how the structures of grammar 'come into existence in the mind of a speaker', we can add further conditions on the choice of primitives. A particular choice of primitives can be considered an empirical hypothesis as to the preliminary analysis of data that serves for acquisition of language. Thus we assume (under appropriate idealization) that the learner analyzes utterances and the situations and events in which they are embedded in terms of these primitive notions, and 'abstracts some notion of [the] structure' of linguistic expressions by applying the explicit and implicit definitions that constitute linguistic theory, the latter now being taken as a theory of a certain 'faculty of mind.' The primitive notions of the theory, so construed, provide the analysis of data in terms of which knowledge of language is acquired and verified. Let us assume that some theory of phonetic representation, at least, is fully provided by the primitive set.16 A person who knows a language can create and understand Jespersen's 'free expressions'. Thus he has acquired a system of rules and principles that characterize such expressions in terms of their phonetic, semantic, and other 'abstract' properties. Call such a characterization the 'structure' of the expression. Then among the concepts defined in linguistic theory there must be a sufficiently rich notion of 'structure' for phonetically represented expressions. Furthermore, there must be a notion 'grammar for D', where D is a class of data analyzed in terms of primitives, and the grammar generates an infinite class of expressions with their structures. The grammar is an account of Jespersen's 'notion of structure' abstracted from data by the language learner that 'guides him in framing sentences' and understanding what he hears. The structure of an expression must be sufficiently articulated to mark its manner and degree of 'deviance' from grammatical rule (if any). Thus some notion of 'departure from rule' must be defined within linguistic theory. We may take the 'language generated by the grammar for D' to be the set of expressions assigned structures with zero deviance, among them, a refinement of D. 17 Regarding linguistics now as in effect a branch of theoretical psychology, concerned with one of the faculties of mind, we face the further problem of constructing performance models dealing with the ways in 16 We may also assume that as much mathematical apparatus is available as needed for construction of theoretical notions. 17 A 'refinement', in that a significant theory of language learning will have to deal with the fact that some of the data may be dismissed or assigned a special deviant status, in some instances, on the basis of the acquired grammar.

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which knowledge of language is put to use. Given such models, we could bring new data to bear on the choice of grammars, hence indirectly, linguistic theory. A grammar, then, purports to be a true theory of one of the cognitive structures attained by a particular language-user, and linguistic theory may be regarded as a theory of one aspect of the 'initial state of the organism', a species-specific property common to all normal humans. 18 To return now to the problem of developing a linguistic theory along these lines, suppose that we construct a system of 'levels', each constituting an integrated system of representation in terms of elements with well-defined properties and related to other levels in ways specified by the general theory. We might consider, for example, such levels of representation as the following: phonetics, phonology, word, morphology, word categories, surface structure, deep structure, semantic structure. On each level L, we define 'L-markers' as objects assigned to expressions by rule, each L-marker specifying completely the properties of the assigned expression in terms of elements of the level L. We may, then, take the structure of an expression to be the set of its L-markers, one for each level L. The grammar must generate an infinite set of such structures. 19 Proceeding in this way, we can try to construct a linguistic theory in which the central notions 'grammar', 'structure', and 'language' are defined. Various approaches are possible. To mention two, consider a 'procedural' or 'taxonomic' conception of linguistic theory, which assumes levels to be arranged in a linear hierarchy and provides constructive procedures to determine the elements of a given level in terms of the arrangement of elements on lower levels.20 The grammar, then, will be a 'grammar of lists' in the sense of Harris's Methods of Structural Linguistics, the most fully-developed theory of this general sort. 21 An alternative approach might be to specify the class of possible grammars and the structures generated by grammars in purely formal terms, along with a notion of 'optimality'. The grammar for D, then, will be the 18

The legitimacy of this formulation has been much discussed. For some recent discussion, cf. my "Problems and mysteries" (cf. note 3) and the references cited there. For another view of the matter, see J. A. Fodor, T. G. Bever and M. F. Garrett, The Psychology of Language (McGraw-Hill, 1974). 19 A theory of this general sort, but with a different level structure, is outlined in my Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory, mimeographed, 1955-56 (to be published by Plenum). 20 Perhaps, with procedures of 'reanalysis' of lower levels in terms of certain properties of higher levels, as in the theories of Harris and (in a more limited way) Pike. 21 Z. S. Harris, Methods of Structural Linguistics (Chicago, 1951).

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optimal grammar of predetermined form generating D. 22 The elements of the various levels will be those that appear in the structures generated by this grammar; there need be no direct procedure for determining the elements from data, independently of the choice of grammar. I have argued elsewhere that these distinct approaches can plausibly be regarded as expressing leading ideas of empiricist and rationalist speculation, respectively, concerning the acquisition of knowledge. Suppose that we have constructed a linguistic theory defining 'grammar', 'structure', and 'language' in a general way. We can then ask how this theory helps set the 'grammarian's task', as Jespersen saw it: "to investigate the relation between the notional and the syntactic categories." To investigate, say, the relation between the notion 'subjunctive' and various forms of expression, we must have some understanding of both the notional and syntactic categories that enter into this relation (cf. note 5). More generally, if we are to study language as 'sound with a meaning', we must give some account of sound and some account of meaning, or at least, some conditions on characterization of sound and meaning of expressions. A phonetic theory, taken as a linguistic level in the sense just indicated, provides a universal mode for the representation of sound. The hypothesis that linguistic theory contains such a level of representation has rarely been questioned, but it is, of course, an empirical hypothesis. One might, without contradiction, propose a theory of language that related surface structure to, say, neural instructions, with no 'intermediate level' of any systematic sort. Postulation of a level of phonetic representation requires justification. This might take several forms: demonstration that its elements have systematic properties and observe certain general principles, that they relate to other levels of linguistic structure by rules of some generality and interest, that phonetic representations play a significant role in performance models. Similar questions arise with regard to a postulated level of semantic representation. Is there a system of language-independent representation in terms of which we can characterize speech-act potential, role in inference, and so on, and which is related in some interesting way to other structures of language ? Is there a 'broader-minded logic' of the 22

But see note 17. D might be more complex. Suppose that 'word' and 'deviant' (i.e., corrected by the linguistic community) are primitives. Then the grammar for D must directly generate the phonetically represented sentences and assign the correct degree of deviance to the deviant sentences, and must generate only strings analyzable into successive words. The richer the preliminary analysis of data in terms of primitive notions, the stronger the conditions to be satisfied by the grammar for D.

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sort to which Jespersen alluded that enters into linguistic theory as a level of representation, playing a significant role in the use of expressions in thought and communication; or, alternatively, should a theory of speech-acts, inference, or truth be developed directly in terms of the categories of syntax themselves ? Jespersen seems to have taken the former view, or he would not have spoken of "the mutual relation of these two 'worlds' in various languages". And the hypothesis seems to have considerable initial plausibility.23 Consider just the 'theory of the significations of words', which forms the basis for any semantics. The relations between 'murder' and 'assassinate', or 'uncle' and 'male', or 'cheerful' and 'unhappy', ought to be expressible in terms that are not drawn from the theory of syntactic forms and categories or the world of fact and belief. There are no possible worlds in which someone was assassinated but not murdered, an uncle but not male, cheerful but unhappy. 24 The necessary falsehood of 'I found a female uncle' is not a matter of syntax or fact or belief. Considerations of modality do not suffice to make the relevant distinctions. 'I found a proof of the parallel postulate' and 'I found a Euclidean triangle with angles adding up to 200°' have the same truth value in all possible worlds, but are utterly different in meaning and correspondingly make different contributions to the truth value of sentences in which they are embedded (e.g., 'John believes that ...'). Furthermore, it seems reasonable to suppose that the factors that enter into determining the necessary falsehood of these expressions are different in kind from those that assign the same property to 'I found a female uncle'. While there is not much firm ground in this region, it seems plausible to hope that advances in semantic theory will clarify and explain these distinctions. Consideration of further topics in semantics (e.g., the properties of quantificational structures briefly noted earlier) also lend plausibility to the hypothesis that a level of semantic representation can be constructed within linguistic theory. If so, we can think of the levels of phonetic and semantic representation as providing the means for describing Jespersen's 'outward form' and 'inner meaning', the other 23 For varying views on these matters, see J. J. Katz, Semantic Theory (Harper and Row, 1972), and "Logic and language: An examination of recent criticisms of intensionalism," in K. Gunderson and G. Maxwell, eds., Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. VI (forthcoming); Hilary Putnam, "The meaning of 'meaning'," ibid.; and many other sources. 24 Note that 'possible worlds semantics' presupposes that analytic connections among terms are fixed, as Quine pointed out years ago. See W. V. O. Quine, "Two dogmas of empiricism," in his From a Logical Point of View (Harvard, 1953).

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levels constituting the 'Janus-like' system that encounters these two worlds. Knowledge of language does not, of course, exhaust the contents of mind. A grammar is a cognitive structure interacting with other systems of knowledge and belief. The nature of the interaction is far from a settled matter; in fact, it has often been contended that it makes no sense to postulate independent systems, each with its own structure, that interact in some manner. Idealization and abstraction are unavoidable in serious inquiry, but particular idealizations may be questioned, and must be justified on empirical grounds. It seems to me that the idealization of grammar as a cognitive structure with certain properties and principles, interacting with other structures, is a reasonable working hypothesis, justified by the success in discovering explanatory principles specific to grammar. It is possible to accept the legitimacy of this idealization of grammar as a system with its own structure and properties, and at the same time to accept the view that the actual system of grammar for a particular language cannot be determined in strict isolation from questions of fact and belief. We might construct a theory of grammar with certain 'parameters' determined by broader considerations. If the intrusion of questions of fact and belief is localized, this may be a feasible prospect. Study of language is part of a more general enterprise: to map out in detail the structure of mind. On the assumption just noted, we might continue to regard a grammar as a separable component of this more general system and proceed to investigate its specific properties. A review of the arguments for inseparability of knowledge of language from belief and fact supports this line of reasoning, I believe. These arguments relate, or can be reduced to the 'theory of significations of words', and thus, if correct, show only that that part of grammar that Jespersen called 'the dictionary', which deals with 'special facts', involves considerations of fact and belief. The conclusion, then, would be that a full dictionary cannot be distinguished in a principled way from an encyclopedia, while a grammar can be distinguished as a separate idealized structure, with certain aspects of dictionary entries as parameters. We might accept the legitimacy of the parametrized idealization, while agreeing with Hilary Putnam, for example, that 'natural kinds' terms such as 'lemon', 'water', 'run', and so on, cannot be provided with 'dictionary entries' that ignore matters of fact and belief.25 Then, as

Putnam, op. cit.

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as Quine has argued, analyticity will not always be distinguishable from shared belief. Similarly, such an approach could incorporate, for example, David Kaplan's theory of 'vivid names' and their role in inference,26 while still adopting the idealization. But consider the rules that determine the truth conditions for sentences and other aspects of their meaning in terms of the signification of words and the structure of the sentence at various linguistic levels; for example, the rules that enable us to assign the correct interpretations to such expressions as 'beavers build dams', 'dams are built by beavers', 'beavers built this dam', etc. Suppose that these rules are independent of factual considerations in the manner in which they function and in the manner in which they are determined on the basis of preliminary analysis of data in terms of primitive notions of linguistic theory. Suppose further that these primitive notions provide basic elements for representing the significations of words, and suffice to represent certain analytic connections among words: e.g., between 'uncle' and 'male', 'try' and 'succeed', 'persuade' and 'intend', etc. Suppose also that they serve to delimit the class of possible concepts.27 Then a rich theory of semantics with far-reaching explanatory principles might constitute a significant part of an independent theory of grammar, even though the grammar that 'comes into existence in the mind of the speaker' will be intimately interwoven, at specific points, with other cognitive structures. The idealization to 'grammar' will thus be entirely legitimate, but the theory of grammar will be in part 'open': it will be an abstraction, leaving unspecified certain elements that are fixed in a broader theory. These seem to me to be reasonable assumptions on which to proceed. Our elaboration of Jespersen's program poses problems at three levels of abstraction, we want to determine (1) the structure of particular sentences, (2) the grammar that characterizes all such structures for a particular language, and (3) the explanatory principles of universal grammar that characterize the class of possible grammars and in this way contribute to an account of how knowledge of language can be acquired. Furthermore, we have the problem of determining how this cognitive structure, grammar, interacts with others. 26

David Kaplan, "Quantifying in," in D . Davidson and J. Hintikka, eds., Words and Objections: Essays on the Work of W. V. Quine (Reidel, 1969). 27 For example, they may provide the means for expressing the conditions on 'possible objects for reference' in terms of spatio-temporal contiguity, Gestalt properties, the relation to human will and action, and so forth. For some discussion of the complexity of these matters, see my Problems of Knowledge and Freedom (Pantheon, 1971).

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When we speak of 'possible grammars' we are, of course, concerned with biological, not logical possibility. Such conditions as the structuredependence of rules are not logically necessary, and are interesting, if correct, precisely for this reason. There are no logical grounds for determining that the expression 'John seems to his friends to hate one another' deviates from grammatical rule. The rules of English grammar do not assign it the perfectly sensible meaning 'it seems to each of John's friends that he hates the others', by analogy to similar sentences, though a different linguistic theory, specifying the initial state of another possible organism, might provide exactly this conclusion. The grammarian's task is to discover the explanatory principles that account for such phenomena. 28 For the moment, there is no reason to doubt that these principles of universal grammar are specific to the 'language faculty'. 29 If this is correct, then Jespersen's program can be extended to a significant and reasonably well-defined domain of theoretical psychology. Notice that the thesis of independence of grammar, in the sense just outlined, does not imply what is in fact false, that the interpretation of sentences by hearers is independent of questions of fact and belief. What is implied is that the contribution of grammar to sentence interpretation is very different in kind from the contribution of fact or belief. Consider, for example, the sentence 'John's friends seem to their wives to like their work'. It may mean that to each wife, it seems that John's friends like their work; or it may be understood as the plural of 'John's friend seems to his wife to like his work', that is, with a 1-1 relation between friends and wives.30 Consider the closely analogous sentence 'John's friends seem to their wives to like one another'. Again, it may mean to each wife, it seems that John's friends like one another. What of the second interpretation, which in this case would be that each friend seems to his wife to like the other friends? This seems to me dubious; the relation of 'John's friends' to 'one another' requires that we take 'John's friends' to be a true plural, multiply denoting independently of its context, while its relation to 'their wives' precludes this reading, on this interpretation. Consider finally 'John's friends asked their wives to visit one another'. Again, it may mean that the friends ask that the 28

The explanation, I think, lies in the trace theory of movement rules and the specified subject condition, outlined in my "Conditions on transformations," in S. Anderson and P. Kiparsky, eds., A Festschrift for Morris Halle (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973). 29 For discussion of this question, and of opposing views, see my "Problems and mysteries".

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wives mutually visit - analogous to the first interpretation above - or, perhaps, that each friend asked his wife to visit the other wives. 31 It cannot mean that the wives were asked to visit the other friends. The correct interpretation of such examples raises many questions, but it seems fair to conclude that they are internal to grammar. However, there is another interpretation for the last example, namely, that each friend asked his wives to visit his other wives; this would be the natural interpretation if we replace 'wives' by 'children'. We don't select the latter interpretation because of factual assumptions about monogamy. But such considerations, which surely enter into sentence-interpretation in performance, are easily separable (in this case at least) from grammatical considerations. It would merely be a kind of obscurantism to refuse to make the relevant distinctions in this case, arguing rather that the examples show that grammatical processes are inextricably intertwined with matters of fact and belief. To mention a less clear case, consider again the generics 'beavers build dams' and 'dams are built by beavers'. As noted earlier, the noun phrases in the predicates are not taken to be universally quantified, though the subject noun phrases are so understood, or at least may be. 32 This much seems to be a matter of grammar. But there is, I think, a further distinction. 'Beavers build dams' is true, but does not imply that all beavers build dams, only that beavers are dam-builders: dambuilding is a characteristic of the species. But 'dams are built by beavers' is, I think, naturally understood to imply that all dams are built by beavers, and is thus false. These judgments (if correct) cannot be traced to the structure: compare 'poems are written by fools like me', which I take to be a statement about all poems; 'mountains are climbed by 30

There are other interpretations, with 'they' taken as non-anaphoric. I disregard these. 31 Judgments are hazy, but it seems to me that this interpretation is considerably more accessible in this case than in 'John's friends seem to their wives to like one another'. Correspondingly, 'each of John's friends seems to his wife to like one another' is ungrammatical (in the broad sense) but 'each of John's friends asked his wife that she visit the other wives' is all right. The paraphrases suggest an explanation in terms of the associated abstract syntactic structures, but I will not pursue the matter here. 32 Recall that plural indefinites can be understood as expressing either universal or existential quantification (or set-denotation, rather than multiple denotation), depending on context, in subject position. Compare 'beavers built this dam', 'beavers have been known to climb trees', 'beavers are indigenous to Australia', none of which attribute a property to all beavers. The last says nothing about individual beavers, and is perhaps most appropriately understood as a statement about the class of beavers, rather than about (members of) some subset of it.

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fools like me', which may be true even if some mountains are unsealed; and 'mountains are formed by erosion', i.e., all mountains. The variation in judgment relates to the meaning of the verb. We might say that the sentences receive a uniform interpretation: poems are written only by fools, mountains are climbed only by fools, dams are built only by beavers, mountains are formed only by erosion. In each case, we are saying something about all poems, mountains, dams. When the passive verb is 'creative', we understand further that the entities are formed in no other way, though there is no logical necessity for this, and in fact a different interpretation will be imposed by contrastive stress: 'dams are BUILT only by beavers (but formed NATURALLY when trees fall)'. In a world in which mountains are created by the act of climbing, we might correspondingly give the 'creative' interpretation to 'mountains are climbed (only) by fools'. It seems that there is an interaction of 'structural meaning', grammatically determined; 'connotation' of certain types of verbs; and certain factual judgments. Whatever the explanation for the full range of facts, it is clearly not the case that each datum comes marked, on its face, with an indication of the considerations that determine its status and range of interpretation. Rather, we would naturally expect that only a theory of grammar (in the broadest sense), a theory of belief, and a theory of their interaction, will settle individual cases. The range of possibilities for interpretation of factual and grammatical considerations is immense. Consider the fact that today is Thursday. Suppose I have a friend who, I know, teaches a class on Monday and plays tennis on Thursday. Suppose he says to me 'today was a disaster'. If it is Thursday, I understand him to be saying that he played an awful game of tennis, and if it is Monday, that he taught a terrible class. But these factors in sentence-interpretation are easily separable from those that determine the literal, intrinsic meaning of the sentence, and it is surely proper to conclude that quite independent systems are interacting to provide the interpretation. There are innumerable less clear cases, but none, I believe, that seriously threaten the legitimacy of the standard idealization to a system of grammar - though, as noted, this system may be 'open' at certain points. In all such cases, we hope to discover language-specific rules that account for the literal, inherent form-meaning correlation; and, at a deeper level, we seek to determine the general theory of possible grammars that leads to the selection of particular rules operating under fixed general conditions. Similarly, we want this general theory to explain why the rules of grammar mark as deviant such sentences

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as 'John seemed to his friends to hate one another' and require that the pronoun not refer to the friends in 'John's friends seem to their wives to like them', but rather to the wives (if anaphoric at all). And so on for numerous other related cases. It is hard to believe that people are taught these facts or the principles that determine them, and there is no concept of 'learning from experience' that seems even remotely applicable. It seems that we must look to universal grammar for an explanation. To specify the possible rules, their organization, the conditions on their application, is the grammarian's task, while linguistic theory as a whole will be concerned as well with the integration of grammar in other cognitive systems. Assuming the legitimacy of the idealization to grammar, let us turn to the specific question that concerned Jespersen, namely, the nature of the connection between the structures of syntax and the world of ideas; or in our present terms, the relations between the level of semantic representation and other levels of linguistic structure specified by a grammar. Let us consider the general relations that hold between these systems. I have already noted Jespersen's contention that syntactic structures do not simply reflect semantic properties and Sapir's far stronger affirmation of this position, and have indicated briefly why I think it has merit. But on these assumptions it still remains to discover the principles that govern the relations between these domains. We might pursue the question at several levels of generality. Thus we might ask how some specific theory of language structure specifies these relations; it is here that the most important and interesting questions lie, in my opinion. Or we might inquire, more broadly, into the general nature of the relation that any theory must somehow capture. Let us first consider the latter, somewhat vague question. Suppose our linguistic theory to be of the non-procedural variety. Suppose that among the primitive notions of linguistic theory 33 we can distinguish some that are 'semantic', and others that are 'formal'. Thus we might take such notions as 'synonymous', 'significant', 'denotes' 'satisfies', 'refers to concrete objects', to be core notions of semantics, let us say, primitive in our linguistic theory; while the primitives of phonetic theory, or 'is an utterance of a corpus' (possibly idealized), or those of notes 16 and 22, may be taken to be formal notions. Given a bifurcation of the primitive notions into 'formal' and 'semantic', 33

Recall that the choice of primitives is an empirical matter, as formulated above. That is, not every logically adequate set is 'epistemically primitive', on empirical grounds

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we can ask, for each defined concept, whether terms of one or the other category appear in its definition. There are, then, purely formal concepts, purely semantic ones, and mixed ones. Consider the purely formal concepts. We may refer to the theory concerning just these as 'the theory of linguistic form'. We might discover that this theory - which excludes the core notions of semantics - is virtually null, or quite uninteresting. Or, at the other extreme, we might find that it includes an interesting concept of 'grammar' and 'structure', perhaps all linguistic levels apart from semantic representation.34 The latter thesis - call it the thesis of 'absolute autonomy of formal grammar' 35 - would not imply that there are no systematic connections between form and meaning. No one, I am sure, has ever doubted that there are highly systematic connections and that a major problem of linguistic theory is to determine them. In particular, this has been a guiding assumption in all work in transformational generative grammar, since its origins.36 Rather, the absolute autonomy thesis implies that the formal conditions on 'possible grammars' and a formal property of 'optimality' are so narrow and restrictive that a formal grammar can in principle be selected (and its structures generated) on the basis of a preliminary analysis of data in terms of formal primitives excluding the core notions of semantics, and that the systematic connections between formal grammar and semantics are determined on the basis of this independently selected system and the analysis of data in terms of the full range of semantic primitives. This thesis thus constitutes an empirical hypothesis about the organization of language, leaving ample scope for systematic form-meaning connections while excluding many imaginable possibilities. One might formulate a 'thesis of autonomy of formal grammar' of varying degrees of strength. As in the case of the question of independence of grammar, discussed a moment ago, we might construct a linguistic theory in which formal grammar is independent in its structure but 34

Recall that grammars, in a nonprocedural theory, are purely formal objects. Suppose we take 13k to be the data as analyzed in terms of formal primitives. Then the hypothesis in question asserts that 'grammar for DF' will be the same as 'grammar for D ' , apart from the level of semantic representation, undetermined in the former. 35 Terminology is inadequate here. I have been using 'grammar' to refer to the system of rules that generates all levels of representation, including semantic representation. The term 'syntax' is used generally either in a broad sense, as contrasted with semantics, or a narrow sense, as contrasted with phonology and morphology within the scope of syntax in the broad sense. I will continue to use 'syntax' in the narrow sense, and will use 'formal grammar' in place of 'syntax' in the broad sense. 38 Cf. my Syntactic Structures (Mouton, 1957), chapters 8 and 9, particularly 9.3-4.

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'open' at certain designated points with respect to the full range of semantic primitives. The problem, then, will be to determine the specific ways in which semantic information enters into the determination of a formal grammar. If a fairly strong thesis of autonomy in this sense proves correct, we will proceed to supplement it with a theory of the interconnection of semantic and formal grammatical structures, much as in the case of the study of grammar in relation to fact and belief. The theory of linguistic form may still be a theory with significant internal structure, but it will be constructed with 'semantic parameters'. The actual choice of formal grammar will be determined by fixing these parameters. Suppose that the parametrized theory includes parts of the dictionary, and suppose further that the semantic parameters can be localized to the dictionary. Then questions of fact and belief may also enter into the choice of grammar at this point, consistent with the parametrized autonomy thesis. Note that the significant question with regard to the autonomy thesis may not be a question of 'yes' or 'no', but rather of 'more' or 'less', or more correctly, 'where' and 'how much'. We can distinguish, then, two versions of an autonomy thesis: an absolute thesis, which holds that the theory of linguistic form, including the concept 'formal grammar' and all levels apart from semantic representation, can be fully defined in terms of formal primitives, and a weaker version, which holds that this in true only conditionally, with certain parameters, perhaps localized in the dictionary. To clarify the issues, consider first the absolute thesis of autonomy, which was in fact tentatively put forth as a working hypothesis37 in the earliest work on transformational generative grammar. To show that this thesis is incorrect in some respect and that a weaker thesis (or no interesting thesis) must be advanced, it is necessary to show that certain concepts of formal grammar must be, or should be defined in terms of a selection of primitives rich enough to provide definitions for (or to include) the core notions of semantics. Note that the question cannot sensibly be raised unless we assume an initial bifurcation of primitive notions into semantic and formal in some way. Note further that the 37

In the light of later misunderstandings, it is important to emphasize the character of this proposal. It was stressed that the systematic connections between the theory of linguistic form and the theory of the use of language must be studied in a broader theory of which each is a part, and that the study of reference and meaning must, obviously, be undertaken as part of this broader theory of language. It was further stressed that there is no point issuing manifestos about these matters; rather, there are empirical problems to be solved.

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question is imprecise, in that the precise scope of formal grammar is not clearly determined in pre-systematic terms. 38 In accordance with the absolute thesis, considerations involving the core notions of semantics do not enter essentially into the selection of a formal grammar that generates the various levels of syntax, morphology, and phonology. But, of course, such semantic considerations do enter into the choice of the theory of linguistic form. That is, this general theory must be devised in such a way that the optimal grammar of predetermined form, selected on the basis of a preliminary analysis of data by formal primitives, will generate a structure for each sentence that provides the basis for semantic interpretation within a fixed semantic theory. Thus the theory of linguistic form must be constructed in such a way that the grammar selected for English provides a structure for such sentences as 'the police were ordered to stop drinking' or 'his suggestion was to become famous' (to take some of the earliest examples considered) which will permit a presupposed theory of semantic interpretation to operate, applying its general principles and perhaps some languagespecific ones to the levels assigned in the generated structure. In the earliest work on transformational generative grammar, a kind of 'use theory of meaning' was implicit, though never carefully formulated. Later, it was proposed that 'projection rules' assign a representation to the sentence on a new level of semantic representation, and there have been various inquiries into just how this level is related to other levels of linguistic structure. It has invariably been a crucial assumption that the theory of linguistic form must be embedded in a broader 'semiotic theory' that would be concerned with the meaning, reference, and conditions on use of expressions with assigned structures. The actual range of meaning or use-conditions on expressions thus plays a central role in determining the adequacy of the theory of linguistic form, and any advances in understanding of the overarching semiotic theory will, therefore, influence the theory of linguistic form, under the thesis of absolute autonomy. To show this strong thesis to be false, it will not suffice, then, to show that there are systematic relations between semantic and syntactic notions. This assumption is not and has never been in question; on the contrary, it was formulated explicitly in conjunction with the thesis of 38

On the problems of demarcation, cf. my Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (M.I.T., 1965), pp. 153-60; Current Issues in Linguistic Theory (Mouton, 1964), p. 51. Since that time, there has been much illuminating discussion of the issue, but I think that the questions noted there, and others like them, remain unresolved.

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absolute autonomy. It would be surprising indeed to find important formal elements that are devoid of semantic import. This contention is no part of Jespersen's thesis on the 'indefinability' of syntactic notions in semantic terms, or Sapir's far stronger thesis, or the thesis of autonomy as developed in early work on generative grammar. Rather, the crucial question is whether these systematic relations involving the full range of semantic concepts enter into the determination (and perhaps the function) of the categories and rules of formal grammar, or whether they simply set conditions on the construction of a theory of linguistic form. There have been some sweeping claims in this regard. Thus it has been argued that the concepts of phonology must be based on the notion 'synonymous',39 that syntax depends essentially on the notion 'significant' or 'meaningful expression', that transformations must be defined in terms of the relation 'logical consequence', and so on.40 Such claims in fact, any specific claims as to how concepts must (or should, or can) be defined - must be supported by argument. The burden of proof always rests on one who advances the claim. In these cases, I think that the argument is defective, and that these contentions, so far as we know, are without foundation.41 Consider, then, some narrower and perhaps more defensible proposals. It might be argued that those parts of phonology that deal with such matters as English vowel shift rely essentially on a semantic notion 'related word', involving some notion of 'similarity of meaning'. Thus we must know that 'declare'-'declarative', 'compare'-'comparative' are properly related in meaning before we can proceed to investigate the regular phonological alternations among them. The proposal is that the semantic notion 'related word' serves as a primitive notion that gives an analysis of raw data in theory-independent terms, and that once data is characterized in this way, phonological investigation proceeds. But 39

Or 'difference of meaning', in the more usual formulation. It is surprising that this contention has sometimes been advanced by linguists who deny the existence of synonymous expressions. Thus their position must be that synonymy holds of tokens, not types. It is difficult to make much sense of this view, in my opinion. 40 See, e.g., W. V. O. Quine, "Meaning in linguistics," in From a Logical Point of View; Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, "Logical syntax and semantics," Language 30.230-37 (1954). 41 For some discussion, see my Syntactic Structures, "Semantic considerations in grammar," Monograph no. 8, Institute of Languages and Linguistics, Georgetown University (1955), and "Logical syntax and semantics: Their linguistic relevance," Language 31.36-45 (1955). In the light of more recent work, I think, in retrospect, that some of the broader assertions in the last article were themselves too sweeping, though the specific arguments seem to me correct.

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is this proposal a reasonable one? Can the linguist or the languagelearner determine, independently of grammar, that the relation of 'declare' to 'declarative' and 'compare' to 'comparative' is different in kind, on semantic grounds, from the relations among such sets as 'travel', 'trail', 'train', 'truck', etc.? This seems to me dubious; surely, there is no convincing argument to this effect in the literature.42 The 'related words' are no doubt semantically related, but these relations seem rather idiosyncratic. Given the relation, we can find associated semantic properties, possibly interesting ones. This we expect to be true in general of formal notions, under the absolute autonomy thesis. Some notion of 'related word' may be crucial for phonology, but more must be shown to demonstrate that it can plausibly be taken as a semantic primitive - unless we simply use the term 'semantic' to refer to any poorly understood aspect of language, thus depriving 'semantics' of any real interest. One might put forth a weaker and more tenable thesis. Perhaps the relevant notion 'related word' depends in part on systematic features of grammar, in particular, on the possibility of formulating rules of a fixed type, constrained by general conditions, to express the phonological alternations in question; and in part on the requirement that the relation among related words be characterizable in terms of the semantic primitives - the more readily, the higher the value of the grammar in terms of an evaluation measure. The idea is not implausible, and can perhaps be given substance. If this proves to be the correct approach, we will have a 'parametrized' autonomy thesis. For the moment, the question remains quite obscure. It seems more promising to search for failures of the absolute autonomy thesis in the domain of sentence structure. Several interesting proposals have been made in this regard. Stanley Peters has suggested that perhaps "information about sense must appear in the basic data" (that is, the data as analyzed in terms of the primitives of linguistic theory). In particular, "apparently, some information about meaning is crucial" in determining the interpretation of restrictive and nonrestrictive relative clauses and the differences of meaning associated with rising and falling intonation in questions; perhaps only information about truth value is

42

For possible steps towards such an argument see Joseph H. Greenberg, Essays in Linguistics (Chicago, 1957), chapter II. I know of nothing that improves substantially on Greenberg's proposals since. But the problems in this approach seem fairly serious. Cf. my review of Greenberg's book in Word, April, 1959.

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crucial.43 Insofar as his argument is that "some semantic information [is] needed for language learning" - that is, that semantic information is needed to determine the correct interpretation of these structures - it does not bear on the absolute autonomy thesis (nor does he suggest otherwise), since the latter would also insist on this point. Within the broader semiotic theory, interpretations of sentences are determined on the basis of semantic analysis of what Peters calls the 'basic data'. But perhaps more can be claimed. Consider the various syntactic properties distinguishing restrictive from nonrestrictive relatives, for example, the intonational differences and the option of deleting complementizers and 'wA-forms' plus 'be' in restrictives. Must we - or can we - rely on semantically analyzed basic data for establishing these distinctions? The first question to ask is whether the combinations of properties associated with restrictives and nonrestrictives, respectively, are idiosyncratic and variable across languages, or whether these complexes are determined by properties of universal grammar. Would we expect to find, in the next language, that comma intonation and deletability of initial strings are associated in one type of relative, while non-comma intonation and non-deletability are associated in a different type? If not, then the matter is irrelevant to the absolute autonomy thesis, since a property of universal grammar is involved; there are no choices to be made, in this regard, in selecting particular grammars. Consider the further question of how these clusters of formal properties are associated with semantic interpretations. Thus nonrestrictives, with their specific formal properties, are 'asserted', while restrictives are generally not. Is this a matter of 'choice of grammar', or is the association a general one ? I suspect that the latter is true. That is, I do not think that we would expect to find the opposite correlation in the next language investigated. But in either case, the question has no bearing on the absolute autonomy thesis, which also insists that the theory of linguistic form is in part determined by the ways in which this theory fits into a broader semiotic theory concerned with the association of clusters of formal properties with particular kinds of interpretations. On the matter of relative clauses, Barbara Partee has argued that 'semantic arguments' can settle the much debated question as to the constituent structure of such expressions as 'the book we ordered' in 'the book we ordered arrived'. 44 This example, she suggests, "shows 43

Stanley Peters, "The projection problem: How is a grammar to be selected?", in S. Peters, ed., Goals of Linguistic Theory (Prentice-Hall, 1972). 44 Barbara Partee, Montague Grammar and Transformational Grammar (mimeo-

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that the requirement that semantic interpretation rules correspond structurally to the syntactic rules can put very strong constraints on possible syntactic analyses". The context is a contrast between the "logical tradition", which abides by "the principle of a one-one correspondence between syntactic and semantic rules", and linguistic approaches that depart radically from the principle: various approaches within generative grammar, and, we might add, Jespersen's discussion, outlined above. She suggests that the principle that "the syntactic and semantic rules are to correspond in compositional structure, which is a fundamental assumption in Montague's approach" (which she is elaborating), solves a problem of analysis of relative clauses that is left open by earlier "syntactic arguments". She interprets the fundamental principle in question as imposing a constraint on grammar so strong "that I think it is a serious open question whether natural languages can be so described". Thus, her example is of considerable general interest. Partee's discussion of the problem proceeds from the familiar logical analysis of definite descriptions. She suggests that "the simplest way to give a semantically uniform treatment of definite descriptions is by referring to the property expressed by the whole common noun phrase", so that the expression should be analyzed with the major constituent break between 'the' and 'book we ordered'. 45 This syntactic analysis "can provide a direct basis for the semantic interpretation in a way that [the alternatives] cannot". Namely, we can combine the two 'class-denoting phrases' book and we ordered x, denoting the class of books and the class of things we ordered, respectively, "to form a complex class-denoting phrase, which can be interpreted as denoting the intersection of the two classes", the class of books and the class of things that we ordered; "combining the with the result leads to the correct assertion that it is that class that has one and only one member." The assumption is that there is a uniform interpretation of the, and that "A part of the analysis of any definite description is the proposition that one and only one object has the property designated by the common noun phrase to which the is attached." 46 How does this argument bear on the absolute autonomy thesis? graphed), pp. 43f. Also her paper "Some transformational extensions of Montague grammar," in R. Rodman, ed., Papers in Montague Grammar, Occasional Papers in Linguistics, N o . 2, UCLA, Sept. 1972. 45 Though nonrestrictive relatives, as she notes, might well have a different analysis, with 'the book' as a constituent in 'the book, which was ordered, arrived'. 48 Montague Grammar and Transformational Grammar, p. 44.

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Again, we ask whether the principles on which the analysis is based are taken to be universal or specific to English. It is reasonable to take them to be universal; that is, insofar as a language has relative clauses of the kind that we find in English,47 we expect the same conclusions to hold. If so, Partee's argument tends to support the absolute autonomy thesis. That is, we can interpret the argument (as she does) as providing one of the "constraints on possible syntactic analyses", on semantic grounds, just as early work in transformational generative grammar argued, also on semantic grounds in part, that phrase structure and transformational rules should be so constrained as to rule out, for example, a structure for 'they are eating sandwiches' as NP-be-NP, analogous to 'they are friends of mine'. Keeping in mind the context of Partee's discussion of relative clauses, it is interesting to consider these structures in a bit more detail. Note first that the principles cited are true only of singular definite descriptions; the logical tradition that suggested Partee's analysis is concerned only with this special case. The analysis does not generalize to plurals, such as 'the books we ordered arrived'. We cannot proceed as before, taking the complex class-denoting phrase to denote the intersection of the two classes denoted by 'books' and 'we ordered x\ then applying the principle that 'one and only one object has the property designated by' this common noun phrase. For this procedure will give us the same interpretation as derived for 'the book we ordered', an incorrect conclusion. We can easily modify the principles to accommodate all of these cases. Take the semantically relevant items to be the common noun 'book', the expression 'we ordered x\ the definite article, and plural. We take 'book' to denote the class of books, and 'we ordered x' to denote the class of things we ordered. Then 'book we ordered' denotes the intersection of these classes. Take plural to mean that the cardinality of the set denoted is greater than or equal to 2, and non-plural to mean that the cardinality is 1. Taking B, O, A to be (respectively) the class of books, things we ordered, and things that arrived, and taking c[X] to be the 47

There are, however, systems of rather different types. Cf. Kenneth Hale, "Gaps in grammar and culture" (mimeographed, 1971); "The adjoined relative clause in Australian" (mimeographed, 1973); Ellavina Perkins, "Extraposition of relative clauses in Navajo" (mimeographed, 1974). Thus in Navajo there are relative clauses which have, essentially, the interpretation: the dog is chasing the cat, which were fighting. These require a rather different analysis. It has been argued that English has adjoined relatives in underlying structure, and such examples as 'the girl left and the boy arrived who met in Chicago' have been offered (analogous, in part, to the regular Navajo construction). To me, these examples seem at best quite marginal, and I would question whether anything can be based on them.

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cardinality of X, we can represent the meanings of the sentences (for present purposes) as follows: (1) (2)

the books we ordered arrived: B n O c A ; c [ B nO] > 2 the book we ordered arrived: B nO