Word and Its Ways in English: Essays on the Parts of Speech and Person 9780773549661

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T HE WOR D A N D ITS WAYS IN ENGLISH

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The Word and Its Ways in English Essays on the Parts of Speech and Person wa lt e r h i r t l e

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

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©  McGill-Queen’s University Press 2017 ISBN 978-0-7735-4965-4 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-7735-4966-1 (eP DF ) ISBN 978-0-7735-4967-8 (eP UB) Legal deposit second quarter 2017 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowl­edges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowl­edge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Hirtle, W. H. (Walter Heal), 1927–2016, author The word and its ways in English: essays on the parts of speech and person / Walter Hirtle. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-0-7735-4965-4 (cloth). – I S BN 978-0-7735-4966-1 (eP D F). – ISBN 978-0-7735-4967-8 (eP UB) 1. English language – Word formation. 2. English language – Parts of speech. I. Title. PE1175.H57 2017

425'.92

C 2017-900956-7 C 2017-901581-8

This book was typeset by Marquis Interscript in 10.5 / 13 Baskerville.

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Contents

Preface vii Acknowledgments ix 1 Language and the Mind  3 2 Why the Word?  14 3 The Word as a Closed Watch  20 4 Person, Space, and Parts of Speech: Exploring with Guillaume  33 5 Person, Space, and Parts of Speech in the Noun Phrase  75 6 Case as a Grammatical Category in Modern English  87 7 Person in the Substantive and the Verb  107 8 The Personal Pronouns in English and the Representation of Ordinal Person  116 Concluding Thoughts  199 Glossary 201 Notes 205 References 225 Index 233

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Preface

To awaken curiosity, I sometimes began the first class in a linguistics course by asking students: “What do you think is man’s greatest creation?” – the pyramids of Egypt? the computer and all the technology it gave rise to? a Beethoven symphony? the theories of modern science? While acknowledging the significance of all such achievements, I suggested that there is one human creation without which none of these would have been possible: human language. Even the most abstract theory of the universe or mathematical means of expression presupposes a scientist or mathematician with a mother tongue, a person who in early childhood began to interpret the world around them through the tongue their mother spoke. Language comes first. This led to another question on my part, a question intended to provoke reflection on what we all take for granted: “What is the best language in the world?” Silence. “I’ll tell you: English.” Immediate objections from non-Anglophones: “You’re prejudiced!” Answer: “Of course I am. The language I know best is the tongue I learned from my mother, and if you don’t say the same thing for your mother tongue it’s because you do not appreciate it, that extraordinary means at your disposal for viewing your ongoing experience of the world around you and expressing it to others.” This is what linguistics is all about: to get to know what speakers have learned during childhood, and of course during later life, that enables them to talk about whatever comes to mind. The only impediment in ordinary conversation is when we do not know, or have forgotten, the name of something – a flower, a medication – and have to talk about it with other words, because we cannot talk

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viii Preface

about anything without using words. And this brings us to the topic of these essays: the word. Since every act of speech requires words, the importance of ­analyzing the word should appear obvious. However, we should not take for granted that words are formed the same way in other languages as they are in our own mother tongue. In fact, although there are resemblances between languages of the same family, an analysis of the word is required for each language, an analysis based on a word and its uses. This is why I have limited these essays to the word and its ways in English. Although I have by no means dealt with all the questions raised by this subject, those I have tried to clarify here have proven quite revealing. In fact, they have deepened my prejudice about my mother tongue.

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Acknowledgments

The many discussions over the years with colleagues and students in the Fonds Gustave Guillaume have furnished many problems to be pondered, to be marvelled at, when one considers the ways that words are used in French and English. Thanks are due to Mark Abley of McGill-Queen’s University Press for his ready understanding of the unusual conditions for submission of the manuscript. My particular thanks go to my daughter Marie and to Patrick Duffley, my former colleague and director of the Fonds, who read through the manuscript and suggested the many corrections needed. But I wish to express my heartfelt gratitude to my wife for the continuous support through the years that this publication and all my others have taken. Her support, material and above all affectionate, has made them possible.

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T HE WOR D A N D ITS WAYS IN ENGLISH

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1 Language and the Mind The science of language inevitably leads us back to … questions ­concerning the specificity of human thought … because linguistics is knowl­edge, not of the physical universe within which man dwells and of  which he is a part, but of a mental universe – language – that dwells within him. Gustave Guillaume1

Before we get into the problem of the word, a few remarks about the relation between language and the mind are in order, as the theory of the word applied in the essays to follow is resolutely mentalist. The remarkable progress of recent decades in the means of observing the neurophysiology of humans has renewed discussion of the traditional body-mind question. The amount of physiological data accumulated through these means is so impressive that the tendency in recent times has been to consider the mental to be derived from the physical and to speak of “how the brain creates the mind,”2 as one eminent neurophysiologist titled an article. This has led to attempts to find a scientific explanation of the mind, of consciousness, in the neuronal activity of the brain. That is, the basis in physically observed facts is considered sufficient reason for reducing the traditional opposition by making the conscious mind a manifestation of the brain. Such attempts are appealing, especially to those of a positivist bent. On the other hand, in the same article it is pointed out that what is observed, neural circuits, “are etched, so to speak, with the impressions of a newly learned fact.”3 Coming from the same scholar, this is surprising, because it makes the learned fact, a mental event, instrumental in organizing the circuitry of the brain. Indeed, the very appeal of all sciences to observed facts implies the prior intervention of consciously directed activity on the part of each observer

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The Word and Its Ways in English

to obtain them, and so entails viewing any such observations as produced, in part at least, by the mind’s activity. Viewing a mental entity such as a fact, learned or observed, in this way prompts those of the opposite bent to consider that the conscious mind is essential for both doing science and organizing the brain, and even leads one such scholar to speak of “how the self controls its brain.”4 And for some linguists, “all we are born with is a highly specialized capacity to learn. As the child acquires language, the system is probably engraved somehow on the brain.”5 Thus it seems evident that the traditional question concerning the brain-mind relationship has not yet been settled. In fact, one might well wonder if it can be settled within the framework of scientific investigation, since both brain and mind are involved in the process of investigating it. Be that as it may, the question retains its fascination for anyone interested in our unending attempt to know ourselves, to understand what a human being is. It is hoped that the discussion of language undertaken here will contribute to this ongoing study of “the language animal.”6 f r o m t h e p o i n t o f v i e w o f o r d i n a ry s p e a k e r s

Although there are valuable studies of phonetic activity, aphasia, language acquisition, naming objects, associations between words, and the like, what has not, to my knowl­edge, received sufficient attention is the interplay of mind and brain for ordinary speakers using their mother tongue in everyday discourse, i.e. to express meaning in order to communicate a message. For example, by proposing “a neurophysiological mechanism that creates a common (parity requirement), non-arbitrary, semantic link between communicating individuals,”7 one study simply takes for granted the existence of individuals in a communicating mode. This fails to take into account that communicating in ordinary discourse arises from the intention to communicate a message one has in mind at the ­moment of speaking, and that that message determines the “non-­arbitrary” meaning to be expressed, the semantics of the “link” the speaker intends to “create.” In another study, the authors’ limiting their idea of language patterning to “units in syntax and in phonology” obscures the fact that it is the “structured cognitive units” – the meaningful constructs we call words – that determine both the meaning and the syntax of a sentence. Moreover, what “allows word creation to be productive” is the way those meaningful

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Language and the Mind 5

components are structured, and not “a set of non-meaningful arbitrary discrete [phonological] units.”8 The expression of meaning is, for the speaker, the very raison d’être of a word, of a syntactic unit, of a phonological unit, and of a sentence. This is ignored, perhaps because meaning is a mental event. Such views of language on the part of neurophysiologists may well have been suggested by the work of linguists, some of whom view languages “from a biolinguistic perspective,” as “the products of human biology, of human genetic endowment.”9 Whatever the input of our genetics may be, it can hardly account for a speaker’s constantly varying experience, nor the way in which this is reflected by the constantly varying meaning expressed in the give and take of ordinary discourse. For other linguists, however, the primacy of the mental component of language is recognized: “The most fundamental issue in linguistic theory is the nature of meaning and how to deal with it.”10 But even this can be sidetracked if the linguist considers that thought is “the occurrence of a complex neurological, ultimately electrochemical event,” and that “the occurrence of a cognitive event … consists in the execution of a complex pattern of neurological processes.”11 Again, this approach is focused on meaning as the outcome of processes in the brain, but not on meaning as representing what the ordinary speaker has in mind, an intended message to be expressed in discourse in order (generally) to communicate it to someone else. Neither the genetic nor the neurological approach comes to grips with language as a daily phenomenon of speakers, because both approaches assume that something outside language, namely its physical underpinning, can explain its mental makeup. In the approach adopted here, on the other hand, we assume that a linguist’s field of competence is language, the whole of language (if possible), and nothing but language. This excludes, but does not deny, the extra-linguistic conditions required for the existence of language because a linguist is not equipped to observe them. To be able to approach the mind/brain relationship from a linguistic point of view calls for an understanding of language as a phenomenon in its own right. As in any scientific enquiry, this first requires taking into account our everyday experience of language at its most superficial level, and coming to grips with what we are aware of during an ordinary use of language as a means of communication. We are, of course, aware of the sounds we pronounce or hear (or their correlates in writing) in producing a sentence, but also of the meaning expressed by the sentence. Since the aim of speaking is generally

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to communicate a message, not to emit sounds, the primary concern of linguistics is to discern how the meaning of a sentence is constituted – how the meaning of each word contributes to it – and how the sentence as “the expression of a complete idea” (the traditional description of a sentence) serves to communicate that message. determining limits

To approach language as a phenomenon in its own right thus involves observing how it arises into consciousness as sound and meaning, but this does not isolate it from its necessary preconditions and consequences. As mentioned above, the normal functioning of the brain is presupposed for any act of language. But the normal functioning of the mind is also presupposed, since without it no act of speech would be undertaken. To repeat, if the aim of speaking is to communicate a message, this presupposes that the speaker/writer has in mind a message to be communicated, a content of consciousness focused on as an intended message. Whatever makes up this momentary experiential awareness in a speaker constitutes a necessary mental precondition of any act of speech; but it is not, as such, part of language, and so it is not within the linguist’s field of competence to determine what brought a particular complex of ideas, feelings, perceptions, awareness of the situation, etc. to the speaker’s mind. Rather, the linguist’s job is to determine what brought the words that form a sentence to the speaker’s lips. To do this, the linguist must observe the meaning a sentence expresses and try to work out how the speaker managed both to represent the intended message by means of appropriate words and to express their meaning in such a way that a listener could understand the meaning of the sentence in order to reconstitute (more or less faithfully) the speaker’s message. But here too the limits of language are important: neither the speaker’s message itself nor the reactions to that message reconstituted by the listener(s), nor the way the message relates to reality outside the speaker’s mind, are within a linguist’s field of competence. The point here is that delimiting the act of language in this way – beginning with the speaker representing the intended message by means of words whose meanings are combined to give the meaning expressed by the sentence, and ending with listeners referring that meaning back to the extralinguistic message – permits linguists to treat language as a distinct

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Language and the Mind 7

phenomenon that can be observed in its ordinary surroundings (speaker and intended message, listener and reconstituted message, linguistic context, social and physical situation, neurophysiological activity, etc.), but leaving the observation and analysis of these circumstances to those competent to do so. s u b j e c t i v e d ata ?

This view of language as the object of linguistics, where awareness of the meaning expressed by a sentence is crucial for both speaker and listener, and also for linguist-observer, leads to a methodological assumption which is not widely accepted, namely that meaning can be observed and thus provide data to be explained. Meaning is by definition mental, being made up of ideas, notions, thoughts, impressions, and the like. It can be signified and expressed by physical signs, but cannot itself be anything but a non-physical entity. As a consequence, it can be observed only in the mind. That is, the meaning of a sentence can be observed only by the speaker and by the listener, each on their own, subjectively, through introspection. This fact has led many linguists and others not only to dismiss observed meanings as not objective, not valid data for a science of language, but to seek data for language outside language – in the situation, in external reality, in the brain, etc. There is, however, good reason to question the rejection of meaning as data. We offer two grounds for this. In the first place, to declare the crucial element of every act of speech to be outside the scope of scientific research imposes an undue limitation on the methods of science itself. That is, awareness of meaning on the part of both speaker and listener being essential for communicating, this area of reality would be declared beyond the competence of scientific investigation. It is a fact that meaning cannot be quantified or measured, as is required for data in the experimental sciences to ensure objectivity. However, as one scholar points out, “[t]he peculiar reliability of empirical science … is limited only to those dimensions of reality that can be submitted to empirical control. This kind of approach is insufficient and inadequate when we study the spiritual dimensions of human beings and other metascientific issues.”12 That is, rather than excluding meaning from research, this should be a challenge to find a means of examining it in a rational manner to provide a linguistic explanation of what all speakers and listeners experience as part of reality.

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To meet such a challenge, however, the objection arising from the subjectivity of meaning must likewise be met. The advantage of objectivity is that others can observe objective data if they are able to repeat the same process of observation that produced it. That is, any observer competent to interpret the reading on a dial, the chemical reaction, the microscopic entity discerned, etc. can verify the existence of what is proposed as data to be explained. Although such means of observation as are used in the empirical sciences are not available for mental objects, this does not mean that these objects cannot be observed. Anyone who dreams has an awareness of seeing and hearing something, but the problem here is that nobody else can observe the dream as such and validate the dreamer’s observation, and so it cannot constitute data. This holds true for anything else that comes into one’s mind through perceiving, remembering, imagining, reasoning, etc. In fact, we have no means of making accessible to someone else a facsimile, an exact replica, of our personal experience. That is, as has often been pointed out, the content of one’s state or stream of consciousness is strictly private, incommunicable as such. It remains that we do speak of communicating our experience to someone else. However, this is always through some perceivable medium, such as cries or gestures or music (for those so talented), but most commonly through speaking or writing. And yet even when language is the medium, “all verbal structures with meaning are verbal imitations of that elusive psychological and physiological process known as thought,” as one literary critic put it.13 The point here is to distinguish between “thought,” understood as the speaker’s stream of consciousness, and its “verbal imitation” expressed as meaning. This distinction has often been felt by poets who find that language cannot come to grips with the precise set of impressions they want to express because the meaning expressed by a sentence is usually a generalization of a particular experience, an “imitation” – or, as it is usually called, a “representation” – obtained by means of the abstract meanings of words.14 The advantage of representing one’s experience in this way and expressing it as the meaning of a sentence is that it can be understood by others. On the other hand, this leaves it to the listener to interpret the sentence’s meaning in order to reconstitute the speaker’s experience, i.e. to identify the referent, the message. Interpreting the sentence’s meaning to find what the speaker had in mind, often called “referring,” depends on the linguistic context, situation, speaker, etc., and so may vary from one listener to another.

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Language and the Mind 9

What does not vary, however, what is common to both speaker and listener in the process of communication, is what the sentence expresses – its meaning – which must be understood by the listener before any interpretation can be undertaken. That is, the meaning expressed by a speaker is observable by a listener, by any listener who understands the language spoken. And this is the point I am trying to make: any competent observer (where “competent” means any listener who understands the language spoken) can, through introspection, observe the same mental fact, and arrive at the same understanding of a sentence such as It’s raining. Although this makes a great number of possible observers – all speakers of English – the fact of understanding the same meaning expressed makes possible their ability to communicate with one another. So I maintain that this consensus not only constitutes a necessary condition for communication by means of language, but also guarantees that what is observed subjectively is a reality, a mental reality, verifiable by any competent observer. It follows that meaning must be considered data that can be explained by a linguist. meaning as intersubjective and communicable

This claim no doubt raises questions: for instance, what about cases of in/miscomprehension, where speaker and listener(s) are not on the same wavelength? This may arise when a speaker uses a word unknown to listeners, making it impossible for them to understand the sentence. Here, of course, communication is blocked because the listeners cannot understand the meaning expressed and are therefore not competent observers. Another issue arises when speaker and listener fail to observe introspectively the same meaning, as when both a literal and a metaphorical reading of a word or expression are possible. For example, simply overhearing A queer bird, that! could give rise to different understandings and interpretations of the sentence if the listener is not sufficiently aware of the situation or linguistic context. Here, too, communication would be inhibited. On the other hand, the meaning understood by the listener may not be that intended by the speaker. For example, the use of a general term, as in Hand me the thingamabob, would permit the listener to understand the general sense that the sentence expresses, but not to interpret it to identify the specific entity the speaker has in mind, unless there is sufficient indication from context (anaphora) and/

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or situation (gesture). Such examples help bring out the difference between understanding the meaning of a sentence and interpreting it, referring the meaning outside language in order to reconstitute the speaker’s intended message. Equally important is the difference between the meaning and the intended message, an expression introduced above with the common-sense remark that before we can say something, we must have something to say, something in our ongoing stream or state of conscious experience that we want to express by means of language. This content of consciousness plus the intention to express it constitutes the intended message, a reality often overlooked by linguists. William James gives a striking description of it: Has the reader never asked himself what kind of mental fact is his intention of saying a thing before he has said it? It is an entirely definite intention, distinct from all other intentions, an absolutely distinct state of consciousness, therefore; and yet how much of it consists of definite sensorial images, either of words or of things? Hardly anything! Linger, and the words and things come into the mind; the anticipatory intention, the divination is there no more. But as the words that replace it arrive, it welcomes them successively and calls them right if they agree with it, and rejects them and calls them wrong if they do not. It has therefore a nature of its own of the most positive sort, and yet what can we say about it without using words that belong to the later mental facts that replace it?15 Some would of course object to considering the intention of saying something before saying it to be a fact, because it puts a mental state in the position of being a necessary precondition of a physical-­ mental act of language. It remains, however, that we have all had the experience of this distinct state of consciousness when waiting to speak or to get to our computer to put an idea into writing. This of course brings us back to the more general question of the relationship between mind and brain. non-physical vs. physical

A person’s intention, commonly experienced as a prerequisite of many human activities besides speaking and writing, even appears to provide the prerequisite for activating certain technological devices

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Language and the Mind 11

for disabled patients, as in the following account from an article about “brainwave controllers”: One is a wheelchair that generates a 3D map on a screen. A blue dot jumps between places on the map and when it hits the desired destination, the e e g electrodes pick this up and steer the wheelchair towards it … Last year an Austrian company … released a system that uses e e g to allow paralysed patients to type. The system highlights letters one by one on a grid. When the desired letter comes up an e e g headset picks up the brain activity associated with recognising it.16 That is, the intention involved in reaching the “desired destination” and typing the “desired letter” can trigger the brain activity, which in turn activates the device in the way desired. What appears to be “controlling things via thought alone” poses the basic question clearly: while the cause-and-effect chain of physical activity from brain to e e g electrodes to wheelchair or keyboard can be described in terms of the physical processes involved, the relation between intention and neural activity, between mind and brain, between non-physical and physical, remains a mystery. Declarations such as “States of mind begin physically, and physical they remain”17 are based not on evidence but on the reductive presupposition that the mind is somehow a physical entity. This may be good scientism but it is not good science, because it does not explain the difference we experience between physical and mental entities. For example, we all know that sharing a physical object such as an apple with someone leaves us with only part of it, but sharing an idea does not involve dividing it between two people. The upshot of all this is that there appears to be a two-way relationship involved here: brain prompting mental activity as in perceiving, and mind prompting neural activity as in speaking or writing, a parallelism that should not be allowed to mask the differences involved. As already mentioned for ordinary discourse, the speaker’s intended message, often the result of complex brain activity somehow integrated by the mind, prompts the meanings, one by one, that represent that message in linguistically sayable units – words. Once formed in the speaker’s mind, each word triggers both a neural activity to produce its physical sign and a mental activity to relate its meaning to the meaning of other words, ultimately integrating them all to give a coherent message.

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This rapid overview of a speaker’s role remains to be complemented by the listener’s role, if in proper scientific fashion one tries to take in the whole of the phenomenon. Moreover, producing each word is a complicated mental process of integrating its various meaning components and actualizing its sign. What has been summarily presented so far, however, should suffice to indicate that those who would reduce the mental side of language to the “semantic interpretation” of a neurologically engendered utterance cannot come to grips with the act of language as such, the object of linguistics as a science. Such reductionism in linguistics ignores the common human experience that nothing mental (thoughts, feelings, dreams, etc.) can be communicated to others without some physical means of expression. Since meaning is something mental, this has led to the traditional view of language as consisting of signs (symbols, tokens, etc.) signifying (calling to mind, standing for, etc.) a meaning (signification, import, etc.). That is to say, we cannot carry out an act of language, oral or written, without calling on sign and meaning, the physical and the mental.18 Moreover, we see here that the one can be a necessary prior condition for the other. For example, the physical sign is necessary to call to the listener’s mind a word’s meaning, whereas for the speaker, a word’s meaning is what calls to mind its sign. It should not be lost from view, however, that the relations between the mental and the physical have yet to be clarified. How does the mental intervene to prompt the physical, or the physical to prompt the mental? Do they have properties in common permitting one to condition the other? This confronts us with the traditional question of mind-brain dualism. conclusion

This question cannot be settled within the limits of linguistics. However, since the question is most blatantly posed by the expression and understanding of meaning in ordinary discourse, an approach to language focusing on meaning may throw new light on it. It may at least help keep us from making presuppositions that reduce thought to its physical counterpart in the brain, and that locate mental events in “the recondite interior of the brain” where they “cannot be measured by conventional instruments.”19 Insofar as language itself is concerned, a closer look at meaning shows that although it may well be accompanied by “a complex

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Language and the Mind 13

neurological, ultimately electrochemical event,” it cannot be reduced to that, nor to a “product of human biology,” as the linguists mentioned above claim. The ordinary speaker’s awareness of the meaning of a sentence, the “complete idea” it expresses, can only be explained by examining the meaning of the words constituting the sentence. This leads to the crucial problem of analyzing a word’s meaning, distinguishing its different components, lexical and grammatical, and showing how they are combined to form the meaning import of a word, a problem that cannot be undertaken within the confines of this essay.20 However, the fact that as speakers we carry out this complex process of integrating diverse elements of meaning each time we use a word does suggest that what we have acquired as our mother tongue is a remarkable construct. In short, if the whole purpose of language is to represent and express our mental experience as meaning, it would appear that language is organized in terms of its mental constituents, that it is instituted primarily as a mental construct. This in no way eliminates the need for a physical substratum in the brain, but it does suggest that the neural circuits underlying language “are etched, so to speak, with the impressions of a newly learned fact” – a newly ­learned lexeme or grammatical system, for example, what Guillaume described as the result of “sculpturing the mental in the physiological.”21 Although this does not of course settle the brain/mind question, it does indicate a different approach to it, one evoked some years ago by Penfield with reference to language: “To this extent, one might well say that the brain of man is molded by his mind.”22 And it also helps us understand why we can speak our mind, but not our brain.

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2 Why the Word? Science is founded on the insight that the world of appearances tells of hidden things, things which appearances reflect but do not resemble. Gustave Guillaume1

The thread running through these varied essays is the word, “one of the most basic and intuitively most salient of all linguistic categories”2 for one linguist, but for another, something “linguists are a bit uncomfortable with.”3 A third linguist asks: “Why is it that the element of language which the native speaker feels he knows best is the one about which linguists say least?”4 And in fact the entry word does not figure in the indexes of some books in linguistics. Why this neglect of the word, “a universal design feature of languages,”5 among modern linguists? It appears to arise from a new way of viewing words by linguists. One introductory work from a generative point of view treats noun, adjective, adverb, etc., along with verb phrase, adjective phrase, sentence, and so on, as “syntactic categories.”6 From another point of view, “[c]ognitive grammar is not at all wedded to the traditional ‘parts of speech’ or the classes implied by standard grammatical ­terminology,” but it does recognize that, in context, “a lexeme takes on noun-like or verb-like properties.”7 For another cognitivist, the “­traditional parts of speech” are treated as word classes. “Words are assigned to classes on the basis of common syntactic properties”: phonological, morphological, distributional.8 Likewise a generativist argues that “we can make generalizations (scientific ones) about the behavior of different word types. This is why we need parts of speech in syntactic theory … The part of speech of a word is determined by its place in the sentence and by its morphology, not by its meaning.”9 It is not uncommon to refer to the “traditional parts of speech” as “word classes” in this way. On the other hand, two of the authors just

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Why the Word? 15

cited have expressed reservations. Carnie questions this approach: “Have we created a circular argument: category determines position in the sentence and the position in the sentence determines category? Is this really circular? Does it matter?”10 As it stands, it certainly is a circular argument, but this matters little if the aim is to describe usage by generalizing it. On the other hand, it matters a great deal if the aim is to explain syntax by its components. And Taylor, in an earlier publication, points out the inadequacy of distribution as the sole criterion: If word classes, in virtue of a multiplicity of form-meaning relations, were to disintegrate as symbolic units, we would be forced to fall back on purely distributional criteria for their identification and definition; we would, in other words, be implicitly giving recognition to a level of autonomous syntax. It therefore becomes a theoretical imperative that syntactic categories be associated with a stable semantic content.11 The result of reducing the word to a syntactic category, to the expression of a lexeme without grammatical meaning, does matter. It amounts to neglecting the word, the sine qua non linguistic unit of every act of speech. The problem is not recent, as Saussure points out: One should look for what the division of words is based on because the word, in spite of the difficulty one has defining it, is a unit compelling recognition, something central in the mechanism of our mother tongue [langue] – but that is a subject which by itself would fill a whole volume.12 To my knowl­edge, the only linguist who has looked for what the division of word types is based on – to seek a theory of the word as used in our Indo-European languages – is Gustave Guillaume. He considered that what we observe of the word in discourse “tells of hidden things, things which appearances reflect but do not resemble.” We will outline his reflections, most of which are found in his voluminous lecture notes (twenty-three volumes published to date), reflections focusing on how a speaker produces words to serve as syntactic units for constructing a sentence. Guillaume, little known in Anglophone circles, was a student of the great Indo-Europeanist Antoine Meillet, himself a student of

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Saussure. The foreword of Guillaume’s first major publication (in 1919), on the problem of the article and its solution in French, begins as follows: “The present work is an attempt to apply the comparative method to the formal part of languages.”13 Adopting this method entailed a major innovation: reducing the comparativist’s diachronic macro time span of centuries to the synchronic micro time span involved in an act of speech. Guillaume focused on how speakers use their mother tongue so effortlessly to speak of their endlessly varied experience. He began by observing the variations in the usage of the articles in Modern French and tried to discern the speakers’ unconscious mental system that permitted this variation – a problem that took him over twenty years to solve. Guillaume’s first breakthrough came some ten years later with his publication on time and the verb, focused on the speaker. To study tongue14 in conditions approximating as closely as possible the real conditions of its use, one should start, as the speaker does, from his tongue as a potential and trace that potential as actualized, realized from its potential constituent.15 He described the abstract meanings of aspect, mood, and tense in French, and brought out the systemic relations between them. He proposed that the system made up of these three subsystems constitutes the part of speech called the verb, which apprehends (gives a form to) the verb’s lexeme. Moreover, he described each of these three subsystems as being the potential for an operation in the mind to be carried out every time a speaker needs a verb during an act of speech.16 Because they are repeated to form every verb, he later called these unconscious mental operations “psycho-mechanisms.”17 In this respect Guillaume breaks ranks with most contemporary linguists, who, like Saussure, seem to view the word as a Pandora’s box. They avoid opening it by assuming that words are stocked ready-made in our memory. This of course is a reflection of our ordinary experience of language usage, where we are quite unaware of any mental effort to form a lexical-grammatical unit, a word.18 As a result, various theoretical approaches have been led to focus mainly on syntax. What brought Guillaume to focus on the word? Ordinary speakers understand a sentence without having to analyze consciously its words and the relations between them. That is the job of a linguist:

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to explain what is observed, to analyze the relations between syntactic units by examining the words involved. Guillaume, like other linguists, observed that the speaker must first call to mind the word or words needed to constitute a sentence. In his attempt to respect the real conditions of usage by starting with the speaker, he applied the well-known comparative method that had explained that the “divergent later forms” found in ancient tongues were derived from “some one prehistoric language”19 (and not from Sanskrit as had been previously assumed). This led Guillaume to explain divergent uses of a word by its preconscious lexical and grammatical meaningcomponents, potentials diversely actualized according to the use required. That is, he postulated that, in order to use a word during an act of speech, the speaker had to construct it out of both a specific lexical meaning (with its sign) and a grammatical meaning. The lexical matter is apprehended by the grammatical forms, which give it a part of speech. It is this general form, the part of speech, that enables a word to exercise its syntactic function as part of the sentence being constructed. As Guillaume expressed it later: “the golden rule guiding our work here is to convert the observed result back into a process, a genetic process.”20 He considers the word as observed in a sentence to be a result, and tries to trace its use back to the way it was constructed. For example, we will discuss below how the speaker actualizes the variable permitting bus and station to fulfil the different syntactic functions expressed by the bus station as opposed to the station bus. It is of course the usual procedure in scientific enquiry to seek a prior cause to explain what is observed as an effect. And Guillaume insists as a truism, often neglected, that function in language must not be confused with what functions: “only what exists can function – what exists beforehand, even immediately before.” And he adds as a principle: “the use of things never exceeds or goes beyond their existential possibilities.”21 Thus scientific procedure leads him not only to view function as an effect of the word, but to view the word itself as an effect, as a construct of the speaker permitting the observed use; this calls for an analysis of the word’s makeup, of its mental constituents. From 1938 on22 Guillaume devoted all his reflections to analyzing the word, mainly in French. Convinced that “science is founded on the insight that the world of appearances tells of hidden things, things which appearances reflect but do not resemble,”23 he often

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cited Meillet’s insight that “a language involves a [grammatical] system where everything fits together and has a wonderfully rigorous design.”24 However, the appearance of the word in French, with its relatively reduced declension and conjugation, offers little evidence of its mental makeup – and the word in English, even less. This brings us to the crucial question: How to analyze, in Bloomfield’s well-known definition, the “minimum free form … the smallest unit of speech”25 for the ordinary speaker? How to discern its hidden constituents? This problem is confronted in Essay 3, where Guillaume’s postulate of constructing words during the act of speech is evoked to explain how the thousands of lexemes in one’s vocabulary can all be formed (categorized) by a half-dozen or so parts of speech systematically related to one another. Surprisingly, what he identified as the basis of the lexical system was person, diversely represented in the substantive, the adjective, the adverb, the verb, and the pronoun. Since Guillaume never summarized his thoughts in a single text on person, Essay 4 attempts to collect his various insights and reflections over several years to show how he arrived at his theory of person. Starting with the well-known distinction between the three persons related to the speaking situation, he brought out a spatial component common to all three: a generalized person. An examination of his reflections on how this generalized person provides a variable for different word types has required a detailed scrutiny of his lecture notes from a dozen or so years of his teaching. Like any original hypothesis, this called for a painstaking examination of details to show what his theory of the different parts of speech is based on, an examination of particular interest to anyone wanting to fully appreciate Guillaume’s approach. Subsequent essays apply the resulting theory of the word, based on his general considerations of the role of person in the construction of words, to more particular questions of discourse. In Essay 5 we apply his theory to the parts of speech in a noun phrase and their varied syntactic relations, and we then test it by applying it to what appears to be a part-of-speech tangle in a specific use: in noun phrases such as the really poor, is poor an adjective modified by the adverb really, or a substantive taking the article the? Essay 6 proposes case as one of the grammatical components of the substantive to explain how a substantive as (head of) a noun phrase can have nominal, adjectival, and adverbial functions, with particular attention paid to the widespread use of a noun functioning as an attributive to another noun.

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How about the verb? Although hardly visible in the English verb, person does have its role to play there. However, the relation between person and the lexeme in the verb is not the same as in the substantive. Essay 7 outlines how the English verb can get along without a conjugation for person. Essay 8 deals with the clearest expression of person in English: the personal pronouns. They pose the most difficult question: do they, like other sets of pronouns, form a system? Besides expressing the three persons, this set of twelve (or thirteen) pronouns expresses distinctions of gender, number, and case. This final essay is a first attempt to explore and describe the underlying mental organization of a system which, notwithstanding its complexity, enables the ordinary speaker to come up with the appropriate pronoun on the spur of the moment while speaking. Being exploratory, this description should not be considered more than an invitation to open the discussion of a hitherto unaddressed question. These essays thus attempt to reinstate the word as the sine qua non, the atom, of every act of speech. It will be argued that only by splitting the atom, by analyzing the word to obtain an understanding of its mental makeup, can a linguist explain the syntax of usage in a sentence. My aim in this book is to prompt others interested in the subconscious grammatical systems of our language to apply, rectify, or replace the description of the “hidden things” proposed here.

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3 The Word as a Closed Watch Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. In our endeavor to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld1

introduction

Human language has been an object of study since antiquity, and an object of scientific enquiry since 1786, when Sir William Jones pointed out that Sanskrit and Persian resembled Classical Greek, Latin, and other European languages. The desire to explain these resemblances triggered the study of language in nineteenth-century Europe on a more general level than individual descriptive grammars and lexicons, a level focusing on the historical development of each language and comparing their earliest texts. This historicalcomparative method led to reconstructing what may have been the common root in Proto-Indo-European that gave rise to each of the observed resemblances. In the first part of the twentieth century, the main focus of linguistics switched back from diachrony to synchrony, to describing the grammar of languages, particularly non-Indo-European languages. Structuralism, functionalism, generativism, cognitivism, and other approaches have been proposed to interpret the observed facts in terms such as paradigm and syntagm, structure and function, rules

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and structural description, conceptualization and language use. The study of semantics, and particularly lexical semantics, has also received attention recently. The striking thing about these and most other approaches is that none of them have focused on the word as such.2 This is striking because language as used by humans can only be observed as discourse, as a sentence or sentences (or parts thereof), spoken or written, and every sentence is made up of at least one word, or of words combined by syntax into phrases and clauses. That is to say, words are the basic unit of language for ordinary speakers. One is reminded here of the science of living organisms. All living organisms are made up of one or more cells, and since the cell is considered the basic unit of the structure of an organ determining its function, its analysis is of primary importance to biologists. Linguistics is not of course concerned with analyzing living organisms, but the fact that words are the necessary constituents of phrases and clauses indicates how crucially important it is for a linguist to understand what a word is. Words are the only way we have of expressing what we have in mind by means of language. This is not to say that the word has always been ignored. Dionysius in the first century BC recognized it as “the smallest unit of discourse” consisting of sign and meaning. The speculative grammarians of the fourteenth century went further. Besides distinguishing between a word’s physical existence as “a speech-sound” and its meaning, they differentiated within the meaning between the particular lexical sense it brings to the sentence and its abstract grammatical makeup as a part of speech determining its syntactic function in the sentence. That is, they discerned a mental relation between what a word signifies lexically and what it consignifies grammatically. Although Renaissance grammarians paid little attention to the word,3 this distinction between the lexical and the grammatical was implicit in the work of nineteenth-century Indo-European comparatists as they traced the evolution of the word from prehistoric times. In the twentieth century, although Sapir did treat words as “the elements of speech,” pointing out that their “single radical elements and grammatical elements” make the word “the existent unit of ­living speech … one of the smallest, completely satisfying bits of isolated ‘meaning’ into which the sentence resolves itself,”4 like Saussure he did not pursue these general considerations. Nor did Bloomfield’s recognition of the word as the “minimal free form”

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lead to a discussion of what in a word’s meaning makes it “minimal” and what makes it “free.” More recently, Huddleston and Pullum do speak of “the special status of the word as a basic linguistic unit” and their aim is to describe “the principles that govern the construction of words and sentences.” However, their claim that “[t]he three major processes involved in lexical word-formation” are compounding, derivation, and conversion overlooks the majority of words, words without compounding or derivation.5 Miller6 raises the question: “Why are all languages wordy? Why are words a universal design feature of languages?” To Bolinger’s question “Why is it that the element of language which the native speaker feels he knows best is the one about which linguists say least?” one is tempted to answer: because it is the linguistic unit of which they know least. As ordinary speakers, our experience of words is that they come to consciousness ready for use in a sentence, an experience that has led to the widespread assumption that speakers have a subconscious mental lexicon containing all the words they have learned. This reminds one of how our common experience of the sun rising in the east led to the assumption that the sun revolves around the earth. Getting from this everyday experience to Newton’s theory of gravitation is a good illustration of the remark that “the whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.”7 To get behind our assumption of words stored as “lexical items” in the mind ready-made for use will require some “refinement” of our thinking8 in order to confront the crucial problem posed by the word: to understand how, while speaking (or writing), we can come up with the words required not only to represent and express the specific intended message we have in mind, but also to integrate that message meaning-wise into a coherent unit, a sentence. To my knowl­ edge, Gustave Guillaume’s writings provide the only contemporary approach to language that focuses on the meaning of the word, making it the fundamental unit of language. Any attempt to explain a word’s contribution, both lexical and grammatical, to the sentence must start with observing it in actual usage. Because words in English usually occur without any inflection, observing them as they function in a sentence confronts linguists with the sort of “closed watch” situation depicted by Einstein. We can observe what words do in a sentence, but not the “mechanism … responsible” for the way each of them functions. Guillaume turned to speakers’ (mother) tongue to imagine what set of mental

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components and operations would enable them to produce words representing their intended message and fitting together to form the meaning of a sentence expressing that message. As we shall see, this led him to propose that a speaker must construct each word during the act of speech in order to use it in a sentence. the word comes first

As mentioned above, having studied under the well-known IndoEuropeanist Antoine Meillet, himself a student of Saussure, Guillaume was well versed in the historical-comparative method whereby a prehistoric element is reconstructed as the source that has given rise to observed resemblances in the historical texts of different languages. Since the main preoccupation of comparatists is not syntax but the word, or rather its lexical and grammatical components as expressed by its phonetic sign, it is not surprising that Guillaume, focusing on usage in synchrony, should first turn his attention to the word, and to exploring how speakers produce words depicting the particular experience they want to express. What is surprising is that he adopted the same method as the comparatists, adapting it to the time span involved in the act of speech. He begins the foreword of his first important work, a study of the article in French (1919), as follows: “The present work is an attempt to apply the comparative method to the formal [= grammatical] part of languages.” The obvious difference involved here between diachrony and synchrony is temporal, a time span of many generations as opposed to the present, the smallest perceivable time span. Just as the comparatist tries to reconstruct the original component – lexical, grammatical, or phonemic – which by definition escapes observation but gives rise to various historically observable results, so Guillaume sought to “reconstruct” what permits a speaker to use a grammatical word such as the article to express different senses, different but related.9 Although his study is remarkable for its observation of actual usage, it does not reveal that prior mental system enabling the speaker to bring the appropriate article to the sentence in the appropriate sense. In fact, it was only some twenty years later, in 1941, after “reconstructing” the systems of mood, tense, and aspect of the verb (1929) and reflecting on the system of number in the substantive, that he proposed the system of the article in French during one of his lectures.10

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The point here is that Guillaume’s constant concern was the word and how it is constructed, first in his own language and in other Indo-European languages, and later in languages with very different systems for constructing words. Moreover, his desire to observe the reality of language led him to focus on how the speaker (writer) constructs the word during the moment of speech (writing). He postulated that lexemes, grammatical systems, and phonemes exist as potentials in the mind, as mental components of one’s tongue ready to be actualized. This enables speakers to construct the appropriate word on the spur of the moment – appropriate both as representing something they have in mind at that moment and as a grammatical component ready to play its role in the sentence being formed to express their intended message. Reflecting on words in this way led him to focus on their grammatical systems and so to develop a theory of word types, a theory of the parts of speech observable in Indo-European languages. constructing the word in synchrony

Viewing the speaker’s role in this way, as that of bringing together the lexical and grammatical components of a word’s meaning input every time a word is needed, leads to an eminently operational view of the moment of speech. This is more obvious in languages with extensive declensions and conjugations, but is particularly invaluable for getting inside the “closed watch” of Modern English, whose visible morphology is so reduced that it has led to the widespread assumption that we have ready-made words stored in an unconscious mental lexicon, an assumption eliminating any need to analyze the makeup of the word. As opposed to that static view, an operational view of constructing words in synchrony has proven fruitful, especially when confronted with the inventiveness of speakers. This view does, however, entail postulating both an unconscious thesaurus of lexemes and an unconscious set of grammatical systems, as well as an unconscious set of phonemes. Each of these constituents of one’s (mother) tongue11 is a potential available to be actualized during the act of speech to form a grammaticized lexeme12 with its sign, the word required at that moment. Concerned as he was with a set of repeatable mental operations required for speakers to produce a word, Guillaume called his theory “the Psychomechanics of Language.” He made no attempt to

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analyze the actualizing of phonemes to constitute the word’s sign, and paid little attention to the actualization of the lexeme in one of its possible senses. Because he focused on the grammatical systems involved in a word’s meaning input, he often dubbed his theory “the psychosystematics of language,” since in his eyes a word’s grammatical input is a systemic whole resulting from the mental operations made possible by each of the grammatical components involved (aspect, mood, tense, etc. for the verb; gender, number, case, etc. for the substantive). That is, he considered each word to be a systematic construct made both to express something in the speaker’s particular intended message through the lexeme and to function as part of an integrated whole, a sentence. As a consequence, he devoted his energies to analyzing the systems and subsystems discernable in each part of speech.13 Here too Guillaume’s approach parallels that of comparative linguists. Just as the latter try to reconstruct some common prehistoric root that appears to have been capable of developing in various languages into the observed cognates, so the linguist adopting ­ ­Guillaume’s approach attempts to work out for a given grammatical component a meaning potential that appears to be capable of giving rise to the different senses of the component observed in discourse. Although it exists in the present of speech, this potential meaning escapes direct observation because it is postulated to exist only in the speaker’s unconscious mind. It must therefore be “reconstructed,” described, as a potential ready to be activated whenever needed, a potential capable of representing not only the particular sense expressed in a particular sentence but also all its other observed senses in other uses. A potential meaning that can give rise to the observable facts of a morpheme’s usage can be said to explain its usage, not just describe it by means of a rule. A convenient example is provided by the -s inflection of the English substantive. This morpheme is often described as expressing the sense of ‘plural, an indefinite number of’ the entity designated by the lexeme, as in: Whales can be seen here during the early summer.

However, in: Whales are mammals.

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the -s of whales expresses a different sense: ‘all’ such entities. Far less frequent is the following use of -s heard during TV commentary on the Olympic Games: It was an excellent opening ceremonies.

Here the substantive expresses a single entity (made up of a number of events). Similarly, in: The travellers reached a crossroads marked by a signpost.

the -s morpheme of crossroads expresses a ‘singular’ sense. In the following comment of a pilot as he is preparing to land: The weather is quite pleasant – plus one degrees on the ground.

it also expresses a ‘singular’ sense but for a different reason. The situations calling for the -s are extraordinarily varied14 but these examples will suffice to bring out the sort of variation the morpheme’s proposed potential meaning must be able to engender. Confronted with observed uses where the -s morpheme expresses quantities of the lexeme’s entity varying from ‘one’ to ‘all,’ it appears that the ‘more than one, indefinite number’ sense can depict any quantity between these two limits. These different possible senses form a continuum from one extreme to the other, and the morpheme’s potential meaning must enable speakers to actualize the quantitative sense corresponding to the particular representation of whale, ceremony, etc. to be expressed. This leads to viewing the morpheme’s meaning potential as something dynamic, operational, as a movement through a subconscious mental space or field of quantity stretching from one limit to the other. This possible mental operation, activated whenever the forming of a substantive calls for the -s, can be intercepted at the point corresponding to the number of entities the speaker has in mind. In this way, all the quantitative senses are made possible but only one is actualized in forming a given substantive during a particular act of speech. This summary evoking of the -s morpheme is of course incomplete, if only because the orientation of the postulated movement – either ‘one’ to ‘all’ or ‘all’ to ‘one’ – remains to be specified. This can be done only by taking into account the other component of

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the system of number, commonly called the singular, expressed by -ø inflection with its variation between ‘bounded’ and ‘unbounded’ senses; but this would take us too far away from our subject.15 The point here is simply to illustrate how a single potential meaning, conceived of as a mental field traversed by an unconscious operation, can explain both the variety of senses of a morpheme in discourse and the fact that the appropriate sense can be represented and expressed by the speaker during the moment of speech. In categorizing a substantive’s lexeme, there is of course much more involved than the system of number with its minimal -ø/-s morphology. Grammatical gender, though even less visible, is also a component, but the systemic relation between inanimate and animate (masculine/feminine) has yet to be clarified.16 As most grammars indicate, the substantive categorizes its lexical import for person, usually as third person to situate it outside the speaking relationship. This essay and the next describe how Guillaume developed the notion of person in relation to the parts of speech. Moreover, case, the potential for playing different syntactic roles, must also be part of the substantive, a part which in Modern English is expressed not by the substantive’s inflection but by the position of its noun phrase, as will be brought out in later essays. Of particular interest in this respect is how the recognition of case as a potential actualized in the noun phrase throws light on certain questions of syntax. Thus the grammatical meaning consignified17 by a substantive appears to consist of four systemic components – gender, number, person, and case – but as yet only the system of number has been described in any detail. a t h e o ry o f t h e w o r d i n e n g l i s h

This summary of what a substantive consignifies suggests how the lexeme it signifies acquires the particular grammatical characteristics observed in any given use. Similarly, when a minimal unit of discourse is observed to have tense, mood, aspect, and voice, it is recognized as a different type of word, a verb, particularly when its syntactic link to a noun phrase is predicative. On the basis of what it consignifies, the verb has long been called a time word, as opposed to the substantive, more recently seen to be a space word.18 These two parts of speech thus reflect two general parameters of human experience. The other sorts of lexical words, adjective19 and adverb,

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evidence no distinctive grammatical characteristics except their quite different syntactic possibilities. Whereas the adjective is said about a substantive (or pronoun), the adverb can be said about most anything but a substantive. Thus these two parts of speech appear to consignify different syntactic potentials but not the subsystems consignified by the verb and the substantive. Speaking in this way of a word without any visible morphology “makes the part of speech the determining item” for its syntax, as an anonymous critic pointed out. However, the critic’s objection would reduce a part of speech to a descriptive convenience, a category for classifying words according to their function in a sentence, but not a meaningful category. When these “lexical categories (parts of speech)” are used in different functions, there is “no need to distinguish yesterday … in terms of category as well as function,”20 as in: Yesterday was the first day for weeks it hasn’t rained. They arrived yesterday. Their behaviour yesterday was quite embarrassing.

This approach does not take into account position in the sentence as an expression of function (as will be discussed in some detail below), and moreover begs the question because it is not the way a word is used that determines what it is, its makeup, but just the opposite. It is the makeup of a word, its lexeme configured by a part of speech and all this entails, that determines how that word will function within its phrase or clause. Considering a word’s syntactic potential, its part of speech, to be something consignified by a word and so brought into the sentence as part of the word’s meaning import is a consequence of the word-construction principle adopted here, as opposed to the ready-made word lexicon assumption so prevalent today. This sketchy summary gives an idea of Guillaume’s theory of the word as applied to English.21 Based on the premise that every word brings to the sentence a composite meaning, a lexical + grammatical import, he liked to stress that the mental operation giving rise to the word’s lexical import is particularizing in effect: it calls up a specific lexeme, the form that distinguishes it lexically from other words. On the other hand, the operation giving rise to a word’s grammatical import is generalizing in effect: it configures the lexeme mentally to give the word a part of speech, a form it shares with

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many other words. The particularizing process of calling to mind the specific lexeme required he called ideogenesis; the generalizing process leading to the part of speech required he called morphogenesis. The relation between the two he often depicted in a figure like the following:

ideogenesis

morphogenesis

This schema depicts ideogenesis as a movement from all the lexemes at a speaker’s disposal to the particular one called for, and morphogenesis as a movement taking this lexical result and configuring it to produce the part of speech, making the result a word (with its sign) ready to play the syntactic role foreseen for it in the sentence being constructed. This word-constructing assumption is perhaps most clearly illustrated by comparing the possible syntactic functions of a lexical potential such as shop. Configured for gender, number, case, etc. the lexeme has the syntactic possibilities of a substantive; configured for tense, mood, aspect, etc. shop has the syntactic possibilities of a verb. The lexeme forward is striking in this respect since it can be formed by the four predicative parts of speech. As a glance at any major dictionary indicates, this phenomenon is widespread in English. It presupposes that each time a speaker wants to use a word, they must actualize its lexeme in the appropriate sense (e.g. shop either as a place or as an activity) and configure it with the appropriate part of speech – a supposition that runs counter to the widespread presupposition that words exist ready-made in some sort of mental lexicon.22 The same general binary operation is found in grammatical words such as pronouns, but the particular significate their ideogenesis results in is far more abstract than that of the ordinary lexeme. Furthermore, as potentials, their abstract significates are grouped in small systems, such as that of the demonstratives, opposing what each pronoun signifies to that of the other(s). The same holds for the far more complex system of the personal pronouns, where

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different subsystems (gender, number, person) come into play, determining the particular abstract import signified by each pronoun.23 Like the demonstratives, their different material significates (as Guillaume sometimes called the results of their ideogenesis) are all led through their morphogenesis to consignify the same part of speech: pronoun. Something similar can be said of the abstract significates of verb auxiliaries, though, as with pronouns, many of their individual systems remain to be analyzed. Prepositions and conjunctions are also grammatical words, but their role is to represent a syntactic relation in the sentence, and not to represent something in the speaker’s intended message as other parts of speech do. Moreover, the fact that the material significates of many prepositions can also be formed to be used as adverbs provides further evidence of the binary operation underlying word formation. This possibility poses the problem of distinguishing between the morphogenesis of a preposition as opposed to that of an adverb. To complete this brief sketch of Guillaume’s view of the word, it should be mentioned that there is one type of word to which it does not apply, for example Wow! Although interjections like this are commonly considered a part of speech, one hesitates to consider as a “part” of speech a word whose defining characteristic is never to be part of a sentence. An interjection constitutes a sentence on its own but cannot establish a relation with another word or phrase. As such it appears to be a type of word unlike all the others, a word with no built-in syntactic potential, the “minimum free form” par excellence. This seems to imply that an interjection is a word whose ideogenesis represents a striking impression as a message complete in itself, a word with an ideogenesis but no morphogenesis. describing and explaining

Like any other object of science, language as it appears in ordinary acts of speech and writing must first be observed and described as completely as possible. This is not an easy task, since sentences, the observable units of discourse, are endlessly variable, but within the sentence there are frequently recurring uses and sequences, often described in grammars by rules. More extensive and refined observation often brings to light exceptions to a rule, such as ceremonies and crossroads representing single entities as mentioned above, whence Sapir’s dictum that “all grammars leak.” However, when a

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grammarian’s rule is reified, considered not as a convenient description of usage but as something in the linguistic baggage of ordinary speakers that explains why they speak in the described way, then it is an obstacle to further reflection. As one linguist remarks: “rules represent an immature science, still struggling with descriptions.”24 Recognizing those uses that are not accounted for by a descriptive rule can lead to a more exact view of what is being observed. Rather than being simply classed as “leaks,” as “exceptions” to the rule, such uses should be considered data calling for an explanation, a stimulus for further research. A more scientific attitude, insofar as language is concerned, requires distinguishing between observed data (whether or not described by rules) and explanatory hypotheses describing conditions that by definition escape direct observation. A first step in seeking an explanation is often the analysis of what is observed, the examination of its components, because the makeup of something determines how it functions, as the closed watch analogy brings out. The observed unit in linguistics, in the act of speech, is a sentence, “the expression of a complete thought” as tradition puts it. The syntactic components of a sentence, its phrases and clauses, are observable as well, at least to the linguist, but in turn call for analysis to explain the syntactic functions whereby they become integrated to form a sentence, functions that may vary from one sentence to another. The components of a phrase or clause, its word(s), are also observable, but they too exhibit diverse functions whereby they become integrated to form a syntactic unit, a phrase or clause. Finally, the word, the basic unit of language, also calls for analysis to explain how it functions in a particular use, but a word’s lexical and grammatical components and the relation between them are not readily observable in English. In short, it is only by describing the process whereby a word’s lexeme is configured by the grammatical system of its part of speech that we can explain how it constitutes a word – a unit of meaning with its physical sign capable of functioning as a minimal syntactic unit, which in turn can function as part of (or, in some cases, as) a phrase or clause, and so be integrated into a sentence. In English, the components, lexical and grammatical, of this process of word formation are usually observable only indirectly, through their existence as the meaning import of the resulting word. This is why we are led in linguistics to get beyond the observational-descriptive phase

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of research and undertake the precarious theoretical-descriptive phase of attempting to describe what cannot be seen. Because words are always involved, it is essential to have some general theory of word formation in mind when examining from a scientific point of view the speaker’s role in an act of language. Some such theory of how different types of word are formed is required to explain how different syntactic units are constituted to give rise to the infinite variety of sentences expressing the immense variety of lexical meanings representing whatever speakers have in mind at the moment of speech. So far, Guillaume’s general theory of word formation, as applied to words in English and, mutatis mutandis, other IndoEuropean languages, has helped explain a number of questions raised by grammarians and linguists; but of course many remain to be explored.

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4 Person, Space, and Parts of Speech: Exploring with Guillaume As I see it, the theory of person confronts us with a fact arising from altogether general grammar … the fact that in discourse there is always something spoken of, what is being talked about … Gustave Guillaume1

introduction

Our main aim in these essays is to probe the word, to attempt to discern its nature. Even though discussion is centred on English, this involves such variety in words that it calls for some general feature or framework to begin with. The pairing of a physical sign and a mental significate has often been proposed as characterizing the word, but this is not distinctive since it also applies to non-linguistic means of communication, such as a gesture of a thumb pointing up or down, or a stop light, or a one-way street sign. The above quotation indicates something common to all words: the meaning expressed by their physical signs in spoken (or written) discourse is said about something the speaker (writer) has in mind. Like many constants in our ordinary experience, it has sometimes been overlooked that acts of speech begin with speakers’ awareness of something, of a specific concept or idea they have in mind and want to express through language. In the quotation, however, this commonplace, this fact of general grammar, is taken to imply the grammatical category of person. The justification of this surprising claim will be outlined below, since person will provide the starting point for investigating the grammatical makeup of a word.

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It is interesting to see that the major grammars of English have described grammatical person in a more satisfactory way than do ordinary teaching grammars. The latter often describe person as a category by pointing out that first person is the one speaking, second person the one spoken to, and third person the one spoken about, a classification based on two features, role in the speech act and what is spoken about. On the other hand, Jespersen describes the third person as “what is neither speaker nor spoken to,” thus eliminating the second feature, what is spoken about. By characterizing third person as “the residual category – not 1st or 2nd,” Huddleston and Pullum echo this, describing the system of person only in terms of “utterance-act roles” or the absence thereof.2 This does not of course imply that the description found in school grammars is wrong – it is, after all, derived from what is most readily observed in discourse – but these grammarians base their description of person on a single criterion, the speaking relationship: first and second persons are within the speaking relationship, third person outside it. Quirk et al. distinguish between the three persons in much the same way, but they also bring in the element of what is spoken about: “The reference of these [first-person] pronouns includes the speaker(s)/writer(s) of the message … The reference of these [second-person] pronouns includes the addressee(s), but excludes the speaker(s)/writer(s) … The reference of these [third-person] pronouns excludes both speaker(s)/writer(s) and addressee(s); ie 3rd person pronouns refer to ‘third parties’ not directly involved in the origination or reception of the utterance in which they occur.”3 Bringing in reference, not as an element distinguishing third person but as something common to all personal pronouns, reminds us of something obvious – that all three persons speak about something. This view of the personal pronouns is by no means new. It revives that of the eighteenth-century grammarian James Harris: This account of Persons is far preferable to the common one, which makes the First the speaker, the second, the Party addrest; and the Third the Subject. For tho’ the First and Second be as commonly described … yet till they become subjects of the discourse, they have no existence. Again as to the Third Person’s being the subject, this is a character, which it shares in common with both the other Persons, and which can never therefore be called a peculiarity of its own.4

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According to Michael, Harris himself hearkens back to tradition: he was reintroducing that consideration of the total situation in which words are used which had been the common element in dialectic and rhetoric among the Greeks, and had been one of the most valuable achievements of the medieval grammarians.5 This tradition was the customary view of grammarians, and insofar as pronouns are concerned is expressed by Peter Helias around 1150 as follows: “The pronoun signifies substance without quality, that is it signifies a thing in itself.”6 According to Michael, this implies that a pronoun indicates “bare individuality,”7 something or someone, regardless of that individual’s link with the speaking relationship. Thus it is by no means an innovation to distinguish the three persons by order of rank with regard to the speaking relationship, while pointing out that they are all alike in making reference possible by signifying something merely as an entity. This more complete view of person has not, however, awakened enough interest among linguists to prompt reflection on person as a grammatical system for categorizing words. In this respect, Joly’s introduction to Harris offers a number of insights, and suggests that Guillaume is the linguist whose reflections on person from this point of view are the most revealing. a commonplace and an insight

Although he left no treatise or essay on the subject, Guillaume often discussed person in his teaching, mostly when dealing with the verb and personal pronouns, but also when considering the substantive. During the first year of his teaching, on 17 February 1939, he listed person with gender and number as one of the “categories of representation” arising from the “space substratum,” our common experience of space.8 Although this characterization of person in the substantive does not suggest a view of person very different from that of other grammarians, it does bring out that person, like any other grammatical category, involves a means of representing, and that, like gender and number, what it represents is spatial. Some five years later (13 January 1944) during a discussion of substantive, adjective, and verb in French, Guillaume remarked that

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“a general theory of person” was lacking, and he posed the basic question: “What is person fundamentally?” After pointing out that “in tongue9 every lexeme represents an import of meaning which, to be able to take its place in discourse, must find a support for itself,” he concludes that “person is the support that every meaning produced is obliged to find for itself.” In the next lesson (20 January 1944) he gives a general definition of person: “Person is the support that every meaning produced, every meaning imported, seeks for itself. To the notion of person is tied that of support, to the notion of meaning is tied that of import.”10 In January 1949, repeating much the same view, he gives it a more general setting: The theory of person as we conceive it confronts us with a fact arising from absolutely general grammar which provides a good starting point for anyone who wants, in any language, to give an exact account of the extremely complex organization or assemblage of the system of person. This fact of general grammar, absolutely general, is that in discourse there is always something spoken of, what one is talking about, namely the required support to which the import, which is what will be said about it, will be incident … Quite generally, person is the support which the mind gives itself to attach the imports of meaning.11 This passage states an obvious fact – that speaking always involves saying something (the meaning import) about something – and then makes a novel claim – that this something is said about grammatical person (the support). What is this claim based on? What are the steps leading from this commonplace to a claim which appears, at first sight in any case, far-fetched, if not aberrant? What prompts him to claim that this view of person “leads to a deeper understanding of the different nature of French words and, in general, of words in any language” and that “[i]t has an important place in the theory of the parts of speech”?12 Those familiar with Guillaume’s writings, and particularly his Leçons de linguistique, realize that he sometimes stated an insight but did not make explicit the arguments required to justify it. That seems to be the case here, and so our task will consist of examining his writings during this period of ten years for hints throwing light on what brought him to conclude that grammatical person is an

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absolutely general category. This will first involve clarifying some of the notions expressed in the above quotations and situating them within Guillaume’s view of language as a whole. We will then describe a basic distinction he makes within the category of person itself, before going on to examine the role of person in the substantive and in reference, and finally in the other parts of speech. To make the discussion more concrete and reduce opportunities of going astray, I will restrict it to the category of person as manifested in English, making no attempt to apply Guillaume’s views to other languages. s i t u at i n g t h e q u e s t i o n : message and meaning

To say that words and sentences are always constructed to be said about something or someone is hardly a discovery, because it amounts to saying that whatever a word says – whatever meaning it expresses in ordinary discourse – it says about something in the sentence. The sentence in turn speaks about what speakers (or writers) want to talk about, their intended message. Because it is a commonplace, however, it is “a fact arising from absolutely general grammar,” a linguistic universal, and this throws a new light on it: when reflecting on language, one must never forget that the discourse we hear or read expresses something the speaker/writer has/had in mind, their message. On the other hand, to claim that what is involved here is grammatical person is anything but obvious, and therefore this calls for justification. Starting from this quite general point of view – that we do not speak without having something, however trivial and ephemeral, that we intend to express – is important because it is the whatwe-have-in-mind-to-talk-about that triggers the whole operation of expressing something by means of language, the act of speech. Not only that, but this intended message also determines in large part which words are to be used to represent that message, and even how the words combine to form a sentence.13 Moreover, as discussed in some detail in my 2009 study, the lexical meaning that a word brings into a sentence must be applied to, said about, something: “every lexeme is an import of meaning which must find a support.”14 Finally, once the meaning of each word has found its support in the sentence, the resulting synthesis of meaning – the “complete thought” – expressed by the sentence is then referred back to what

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it has been said about, i.e. referred to the speaker’s message, inferred by the listener. Commonplace though it may appear, this observation thus entails a way of situating the symbolic nature of human language that goes beyond the usual view of language symbolism, whereby a physical sign linked to a mental content (meaning) is shared by other speakers so that they can call to mind its meaning. From this new point of view, the synthesis of meanings expressed by the different words making up a sentence is itself linked to a reality outside language – the strictly personal mental reality of the speaker’s momentary conscious experience – and linked in such a way as to enable anyone hearing and understanding the sentence to call to mind that intended message. So this observation takes into account not only the sign/meaning relationship required to express word meaning and understand what the sentence says, but also the understood-meaning / intendedmessage relationship that permits a listener, often helped by gestures and other factors in the speaking situation, to discern what the speaker is talking about. That is, the link between the sentence’s expressed meaning and the speaker’s intended message must be exploited to communicate something, the ordinary aim of speaking. This, however, raises the question of how in the first place the speaker establishes that link, granted that the intended message is, in principle at least, unique and known only to the speaker, whereas the sentence’s meaning, accessible to all speakers of the language, permits a listener to utilize that link to get back to the message. Thus we are confronted with two versions of the relationship between message and meaning: the speaker establishing the link on the spur of the moment in order to express the meaning by the use of signs, and then the listener, having understood the meaning, exploiting the link to discern the message. In a figure: intended message

meaning

sign  |  sign

meaning

message discerned

This manner of viewing an act of speaking or writing – an act of language – brings out what must precede it and what should result from it. That is, since the message, whether intended by the speaker or discerned by the listener, is not part of the act of language, it provides an outside view of where languaging begins and where it ends, thus ensuring that the whole of the phenomenon is contained in between these two limits. In a scientific approach this is particularly

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important, because having at the outset an all-embracing (albeit confused) view of one’s object of enquiry enhances the chances of arriving at a clearer comprehension of the phenomenon. It helps to have technical words to designate each version of the relationship. The mental operation of listeners going from the meaning expressed to the message is generally called referring or reference, and what is discerned as the result of it is called the referent. Although some scholars understand the latter term in the sense of things in the physical universe, here it will be understood to name what a speaker has in mind, i.e. a content of consciousness constituting the intended message or part of it. The referent may be some experience resulting from things in the physical universe impinging on the mind, or something arising from memory, or from imagination, a dream, etc. This is not to deny that what we talk about often does correspond to something in external reality; it is, rather, to recognize the fact that many factors besides our language help determine the relationship between that extra-mental reality and our experience of it. Besides, we do also talk about things not “out there.” The main point is that we cannot speak of anything unless we are conscious of it, at least minimally, and that as listeners we cannot understand what is being talked about unless we manage to discern, more or less clearly, through reference what the speaker has in mind. The speaker’s version of the relationship, linking the intended message to the meanings of words, is generally called representation. Guillaume, a linguist who attributed primary importance to this process, used to insist that there is no expression without representation in order to bring out the fact that whatever meaning a word expresses in discourse (and no word can be without meaning) represents something in or arising from the intended message. This permits us to complete the above figure: SPEAKER   |  LISTENER representing expressing | understanding referring intended message

meaning

sign | sign

meaning

message discerned

The thousands of different lexemes we have learned enable us to represent the endless variety of intended messages we want to express. That is, it is a speaker’s specific experience that determines which lexeme(s) must be called to mind to depict it, but in order to be a component part of a word, the lexeme must then be categorized

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with a grammatical meaning, a part of speech, as seen above. This binary lexical + grammatical operation required to construct a word representing something in the intended message is followed by the operations involved in realizing its physical sign to express this meaning, as well as the operations involved in the syntactic linking of a word’s meaning with the meanings of other words to form the “complete thought” expressed by a sentence. This brings us back to the commonplace that “in discourse there is always something spoken of, something talked about.” Words are used, usually at least, to say something about one another:15 verbs about their subjects, adverbs about verbs or adjectives or other adverbs, etc., adjectives about substantives, and substantives about themselves. The diverse operations of syntax involved here, which are found with phrases and clauses as well, culminate in the predicate of a standard sentence being said about the subject of the main clause. All these being-said-about operations between components of the sentence (or within single words, in the case of the substantive) are called incidence to bring out that they all involve the meaning or import of one word or phrase or clause “falling upon” or bearing on a support in the meaning of another component of the sentence. All this saying something about, characterizing, something else in the sentence involves syntactic incidence. This is to be distinguished from another sort of incidence, referential incidence,16 which enables a sentence to be about something not in the sentence, to export its meaning to a mental support outside language, to refer to the intended message (as in, for instance, Hand me the thingamabob, discussed above). Thus, reflecting on Guillaume’s commonplace leads to recognizing that syntax and reference resemble one another: both involve saying something about something else by means of incidence. They differ, however, in the support they say it about: within language (syntax) as opposed to outside language (reference). Observing the various sorts of syntactic relations arising in discourse has prompted research in an effort to understand what is built into each type of word that enables it to exercise its own sort of incidence, research resulting in the theory of the parts of speech.17 In like fashion, the fact that a sentence orients the listener toward a referent in the speaker’s mind prompts reflection on what is built into a sentence that permits it to exercise referential incidence.

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Our concern here is how grammatical person is related to these operations of incidence. We will first explore the role of person in the syntactic incidence permitted by the different parts of speech, and then its role permitting referential incidence to an extra-­ linguistic support. In view of the commonplace that we talk about something, it is obvious that there is always a relation between the meaning we express and what we say it about, between the import and the support. On the other hand, what we can talk about is infinitely variable, and this makes it anything but obvious how Guillaume can reduce the support to a single grammatical category, person. person, ordinal vs. cardinal

In 1939, as we have seen, Guillaume considered person, along with gender and number, one of the “categories of representation,” person being traditionally viewed as what “refers to the perspective of the speaker with respect to the other participants in the speech act.”18 In the ensuing years, he reflected on the relation between the three ordinal persons and the constant what-is-talked-about underlying them all. The latter he called variously “third person of fixed rank,” “non-ordinal person,” “logical person,” etc., terms indicating attempts to discern the nature of this generalized view of person. In the remarkable lesson of 21 January 1943 he distinguishes clearly between “ordinal person” with its variable threefold rank, and “extra-ordinal person with invariable rank … what I will henceforth call cardinal person.”19 The term cardinal is adopted here since in English it best brings out the contrast with ordinal person. It suggests through its etymology (“hinge” in Latin) a constant turning to, or taking on, the various roles of ordinal person like “masks.” This variation is best seen in verbs in languages such as Latin, where person, a verb’s only spatial category, designates what is being talked about as speaker or as addressee or as someone/thing else. As we shall see, Guillaume came to consider cardinal person to be a category of spatial representation underlying the substantive, pronouns, and other parts of speech. Distinguishing between cardinal and ordinal in the category of person raises the question of the status and role of cardinal person. Is it a new grammatical morpheme? If it is a representational category, what does it represent? How can it be a support? How is it

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related to what is being talked about, to the referent? “What is person fundamentally?”20 These questions will be addressed from the point of view of “a fact arising from absolutely general grammar,” namely “that in discourse there is always something spoken of, what one is talking about.” This viewpoint implies that the meaning of every word must be said about something – in technical terms, every lexeme is an import of meaning that must find itself a support. To trace how Guillaume came to conceive of cardinal person as “present, not just in this or that system making up the global system, but present in the global system itself,”21 – which is to say, as common to all parts of speech – we will begin by examining why he considers it to be inherent in the substantive. p e r s o n a n d t h e s u b s ta n t i v e

In his theory of the parts of speech, Guillaume defines the substantive as a word with internal incidence; it is a word whose lexical import is said, not (like the import of an adjective) about some other word, but about itself. He points out in the lesson of 21 January 1943 that, to be “incident to itself,” a substantive’s lexeme (séman­ tème) “has to be interiorly two. This interior duality is that of the lexeme in itself and the cardinal person to which it is incident.”22 That is, the lexical import of a substantive brings in its own support. Furthermore, Guillaume realized that this duality within the substantive’s lexeme reflects the traditional comprehension/extension relation of logic, and this explains why, as Guimier points out, he no longer situates person in a word’s morphogenesis.23 In Guillaume’s eyes, cardinal person exists as a permanent potential of a lexeme in tongue – as its extension: “As an internal determiner of the noun, [cardinal person] remains implicit, and instead of indicating an actualized extension of the noun, it indicates only the noun’s potentiality for any extension.”24 Like any other formative element in tongue, cardinal person is a potential to be actualized whenever a lexeme is called on to be formed as a substantive. Viewing person in this way, as a formative element of the substantive, a potential in tongue to be actualized in usage, does not introduce any new component into the substantive, since cardinal person is a means of representing a lexeme’s extension, its representational range,25 long recognized as determined by the substantive’s comprehension, by a lexeme’s makeup. This does, however, throw new light

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on the range of representation by making it part of the substantive’s ideogenesis, and on cardinal person by bringing out its basically spatial character, as we shall see below. Most interesting for our immediate concern, however, is the conclusion Guillaume draws: “On the basis of this difference between cardinal person as the potential of extension and cardinal person as actualized extension we can define the article.” Linking person with the article in this way is, to my knowl­edge, an innovation for grammarians. In his study on the article (1919), Guillaume had recognized that, as a sign of actualizing the substantive, the article indicated the lexeme’s extent of application in discourse. That is, he maintained that the article represents the momentary actualization of a substantive’s range of representation in a given use – its extensity, as he was to call it. This led him to the view that the relation between an article and its substantive is not that of an adjective to a substantive – an article does not characterize its substantive – but rather the relation between a support and its import. The substantive is incident to the article, which is therefore a pronoun, as we shall see. That is, because of its internal incidence, the substantive’s lexeme-import finds its support within its own extension, actualized as a particular extensity, and this extensity is represented separately from the substantive by person in the article. The fact remains that it really is a matter of internal incidence, since the lexeme (comprehension) determines its own range of representation (extension), and the article represents one actualized scope (extensity) within this range. As Guillaume puts it on 21  January 1943: “Within the noun, cardinal person remains the support of incidence bearing the potential of extension. Outside the noun, cardinal person is repeated as the support of incidence bearing in this case actualized extension.”26 Several years later, on 14 January 1949, he generalizes his view in a discussion of possessive pronouns and other “completive pronouns” (determiners): “In brief, completive pronouns participate in the import/support mechanism of incidence.”27 He situates the article with other determiners as follows: Thus the article appears to belong to the general system of person, that is, to the system of supports to which discourse refers imports. The incidence of the substantive to a support is completed only after the article appears. That means that the article is a pronoun which arises during the incidence of the

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import to the chosen support and not once this incidence is over and done with … The article participates in the incidence and, as such, it is a completive pronoun.28 It has often been pointed out that a lexeme can be used with different extensities, and that the article can represent them. A glance at examples will help make the relation between representational range (extension) and extensity more concrete. When we read the following sentences we get a different understanding from the noun phrase subjects: A car is parked in front of the house. A car requires regular servicing.

In the first sentence we understand a specific vehicle, in the second any such vehicle: two very different extensities resulting from different actualizations of the representational range of car. That is, the lexeme’s unchanging representational range (extension) is a potential making possible any “actualized extension” from universal to singular, from a maximum to a minimum extensity (or extent of reference, as it is sometimes termed).29 The article a can express any scope within a range of possible extensity-supports limited only by the comprehension-import of car. That is, the lexeme of the substantive represents the nature of its import, the nature of what the extensity, represented by the article, supports. In this way the support is kept within the range of the substantive’s lexeme, and so its incidence is always internal. It follows that a substantive’s formation as a grammatical entity is not complete until its incidence to the article has been effected. As Valin later points out,30 from a syntactic point of view this entails that the incidence of the substantive to the article is the final operation in constructing noun phrases such as the above, the operation applying the total import of the noun phrase to the substantive’s extensity-support represented by the article.31 The point here is that, for Guillaume, it is cardinal person that enables an article to represent the substantive’s “potential of extension” as its “actualized extension” of discourse. Identifying cardinal person with the notion of support, as seen in the relation of substantive to determiner, raises the question of substantives used without a determiner, as in:

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Cars were lined up for gas. Cars require regular servicing.

Although not expressed by a determiner, the extent of the lexeme’s support is not the same in these two sentences (‘indefinite number’ vs. ‘cars in general’). The listener can discern this difference with the help of the context, but it is the speaker who determines the extensity in each case when actualizing the lexeme car to represent something in the intended message. That is, the lexeme’s support is actualized while forming the substantive during its ideogenesis – in these examples as a more or less extensive discontinuate space – and it is then quantified by the system of number during the substantive’s morphogenesis as respectively ‘more than one, plural’ and ‘all, generic.’32 Proper nouns are quite clear in this respect. Because their comprehension is maximal, their representational range in tongue is reduced to a minimum. As a consequence, in discourse their lexical import characterizes its cardinal person to give a minimal continuate space as an actualized support, to then be quantified by number during morphogenesis as ‘one, singular.’ These cases show that in uses without a determiner to represent extensity outside the substantive, cardinal person is actualized within the substantive to represent the appropriate spatial support of the lexeme in each use so that the lexeme can effect its internal incidence. Thus we can infer that an actualized lexeme characterizes (i.e., imposes certain characteristics on) its cardinal person. This inference provides a means of dealing with another manner of actualizing a lexeme, as in the following example: You’re getting a lot of car for your money.

The expressive effect of car here, often called a mass noun, results from representing the lexeme’s spatial support as not confined within limits. That is, this way of actualizing the lexeme car characterizes its spatial support as unbounded, whereas in each of the previous examples the actualized lexeme characterized its cardinal person support as bounded, giving the opposite expressive effect in the sentence of a count noun. Treating the lexical distinction between mass and count as an effect of representing the lexeme’s spatial support as either unbounded or bounded reflects our need

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to represent any space either without limits or with limits. This is a significant contribution because it explains how all lexemes can exploit this double possibility, and, general though it is, why it is a lexical distinction and not a grammatical distinction.33 Thus Guillaume’s definition of the substantive as a word with internal incidence leads to the view that one of its formative elements is cardinal person, which is characterized by another of its formative elements, the lexeme.34 This view permits us to discuss the traditional comprehension-extension relationship in linguistic terms – in terms of the relationship between lexeme (import) and person (support). Among other consequences, it permits us to clarify the relation between lexical extensity and grammatical number,35 and to explain the opposition of mass vs. count as expressive effects resulting from different ways of representing the lexeme’s spatial support. Conceiving cardinal person as a means of representing a support within the lexeme’s representational range in this way raises the question of parts of speech with external incidence, those seeking a support outside their representational range, a question to be considered below. Here we will continue to examine the substantive by exploring the relation between cardinal and ordinal persons. person, cardinal

+

ordinal

Another question often raised by Guillaume in his reflections on person is the relationship between ordinal and cardinal person. Viewing cardinal person as underlying each of the three ordinal persons involves a double edition of person and raises the question of what this entails from an operational point of view. What is the link between representing the spatial support in terms of what is spoken about (cardinal person) and representing it in terms of the speaking relationship (ordinal person)? The clearest manifestation of this link is found in the personal pronouns, particularly in their function as subject, as support of the predicate. In a study on the verb, after examining its inflections in contemporary English in the light of Duffley’s studies, I proposed that the evidence did not warrant attributing ordinal person to the conjugation.36 That is, on the sole basis of the -s inflection in the non-past indicative, one can hardly assume that the subjunctive, the modal auxiliaries, the past indicative, and even the non-past with a plural subject are all conjugated for first, second, and third persons. Since,

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however, the representation of a spatial support is a necessary condition for representing an event, I proposed that verbs in English involve cardinal person, which, by itself, is too general to represent the support’s position in the speaking relationship. This is why ordinal person is generally specified outside the finite verb in a subject,37 a requirement not found in languages such as Spanish or Latin where ordinal person is manifested in the verb’s conjugation. If valid, this view of the English verb suggests an interesting link between the two representations of person, namely that the representation of the support by cardinal (generalized) person precedes its representation by ordinal person. That is, until the incidence of the verb (and the entire predicate) to its subject has been effected, the relation of the event’s spatial support (represented by cardinal person within the verb) to the speaking relationship (represented by ordinal person in the subject) is left unspecified. Within the verb itself the event is situated in time by tense, but it is not until the incidence of the verb to its subject has been accomplished that its event is situated in space. It takes the ordinal person of the subject to indicate whether the event being talked about is inside or outside the speaking relationship. In this way, after being situated by means of tense in grammatically represented time, the event is also linked directly (first person) or indirectly (second or third person) with the position of the speaker carrying out the act of language. The upshot of all this is that the finite verb’s cardinal person must be actualized by making it incident to the ordinal person of the subject. Are we justified in speaking of ordinal person in the substantive, even though there is no visible sign of it? We do get an indication of it in cases where substantives are used to address someone. To call Nurse! the speaker must characterize the lexeme’s support as second person because it represents both what is talked about and the addressee, whereas to call Scalpel! the speaker must characterize the lexeme’s support as third person because it represents what is talked about as outside the speaking relationship. Although there is no sign indicating this difference, a listener would have no trouble distinguishing them thanks to the lexeme, which, in each case, represents the nature of what is being talked about – a human being capable of participating in the speaking relationship and an object incapable of it.38 The point of mentioning different ordinal persons in these examples is to show that a substantive’s cardinal person is

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determined for rank, almost always as third person because substantives usually designate something outside the speaking relationship. Thus, even though they have no visible marking, we are led to recognize both cardinal and ordinal persons as formative elements in the substantive, the latter actualizing the former. In his lecture of 4 June 1948 toward the end of a discussion of person and the substantive, Guillaume presents as “a sound teaching” the following description of the relation between cardinal and ordinal persons: Cardinal person is the complete basis of the system of person. Ordinal person is only a specification of cardinal person … To have in tongue the system of person, cardinal person must be required to undergo specifying through the act of language. If this requirement is not met, there can exist in tongue no system of person as understood here.39 Thus he appears to consider that in the substantive cardinal person is the underlying spatial potential to be characterized in each use not only by the lexeme (as unbounded or bounded) but also by ordinal person to provide an appropriate spatial support which can then be configured by the grammatical systems of morphogenesis. This gives an idea of the role of cardinal person in the forming of substantives. It remains to examine more closely what in the speaker’s intended message cardinal person represents in order to provide a support for the meaning-import of a substantive, as well as a support for a verb incident to its noun phrase subject. person and reference

So far we have seen that a substantive’s lexeme represents the nature of some entity and that cardinal person provides the lexeme’s spatial support in each use, its extensity wide or narrow corresponding to the way the speaker momentarily views that entity. That is, being a component of all substantives, cardinal person has the potential for representing something common to any entity we perceive physically or mentally – the space it occupies, physical or mental.40 When actualized, it represents the space occupied by that entity in the intended message being languaged by the speaker. Because it represents the space involved in “what is being talked about,” cardinal

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person is a fact of “general grammar.” Here the expression “what is being talked about” is of course to be understood, not in the sense of the subject that a predicate talks about (syntactic incidence), but in the sense of the support outside of language that the meaning of a sentence talks about (referential incidence). In this sense, cardinal person represents the space occupied by the substantive’s referent in the speaker’s intended message.41 The distinction between the two types of incidence is of considerable importance here because it helps bring out that cardinal person has a double role, as is most readily seen in the article and other determiners of a noun phrase. As we saw above, Guillaume insists that articles are completive pronouns – “completive” to emphasize the fact that their syntactic function is not to bring a lexical supplement to their noun phrase but to provide a support permitting the completion of the substantive’s internal incidence; and “pronoun” to bring out that they incorporate into the noun phrase cardinal person but not a lexical import (as adjectives do). Like the demonstratives, some and any, the possessives, etc., the articles constitute one of the systems of completive pronouns, often called determiners because they determine “the kind of reference a particular noun phrase has.”42 Each set of determiners has its own means of locating the referent of its noun phrase in the speaker’s intended message. These pronouns thus are capable of fulfilling a double function: providing a syntactic support for the substantive and pointing to a referential support for the phrase. The same can be said of pronouns used as suppletives, since in a sentence such as This is wonderful! the demonstrative, as subject, provides a syntactic support for the predicate and, as a deictic, refers to something that the speaker has in mind (and that is known to, or observable by, the listener). That is, suppletive pronouns can also play both a syntactic and a referential role, and in this they resemble proper nouns and other bare substantives. Thus it seems clear that cardinal person enables substantives and pronouns not only to provide a linguistic support for syntactic incidence as was seen above, but also to point to or designate an extra-linguistic support, a referent in the speaker’s intended message, through referential incidence. We have yet to examine what permits cardinal person to exercise referential incidence. What is it that enables the spatial support of a substantive, as represented by a completive pronoun or within the lexical import itself in a bare substantive, to orient the listener to something outside

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language in the intended message, to find a referent for the import of the noun phrase? Explaining a function entails examining the prior condition permitting it, and so at this point attention must be focused, not on the function itself, on the listener’s operation of referring once the sentence has been expressed, but on the much earlier moment in the act of language when the speaker undertakes the mental operation of representing something, an operation required to form a substantive or pronoun. As we have seen, during the word’s ideogenesis the category of person is called on to represent a space in the intended message that will serve both as a support in the noun phrase and eventually as a means of referring back to that space in the intended message. As a potential, the category of person is capable of representing any such space, but what is required is the representing of a specific space, the place occupied by the entity the speaker has in mind at that moment. In a substantive it is as though, confronted by the experiential reality of a physical object such as a house or a mental object such as hope, the speaker represents its distinctive nature by means of the lexeme, and its range of representation (extension) by means of cardinal person. That is, cardinal person is general enough to represent the extension specific to any lexeme, represent it as an abstraction, as though that space could be separate from the entity itself. This spatial representation common to all substantives corresponds to something we experience in all objects: an occupied position in space, physical or mental. A space represented by cardinal person is so abstract that it cannot be expressed as such, but must be individuated by what occupies it. As Guillaume points out, during the actualization of its lexeme a substantive “characterizes cardinal person by import of [lexical] matter.”43 Once the notion house or hope is incident to its extension, it can be configured by the other grammatical systems of the substantive. Similarly in the pronoun: cardinal person is characterized by a pronoun’s abstract material import and by ordinal person before being configured by the pronoun’s grammatical categories leading to the part of speech. Besides the space in the intended message represented by cardinal person, a pronoun’s abstract material import consists of a means of locating that space, a means proper to each subsystem (demonstratives vs. possessives, for example) and to the individual pronoun (this vs. that) within a subsystem. Even the articles, which represent extensity in relation to the representational range of

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the substantive’s lexeme, provide an indication of how to locate the support in the intended message, as the frequent attempts to analyze their role in terms of “definite” or “indefinite” reference indicate. Although the question of personal pronouns will be discussed in some detail in Essay 8, it will be useful here to briefly examine the pronoun it, since it provides a clear illustrations of the way cardinal person depicts the space occupied by “what is being talked about” when used as a so-called “empty” or “prop” subject,44 as in: It’s half past five. It’s warm today. How’s it going?

The pronoun here refers not to the space occupied by some particular entity in the intended message but to the mental space occupied by the intended message itself. To characterize the space of that unspecified ambient situation the speaker has in mind – the time, the weather, life in general – requires the incidence of the rest of the sentence. The same can be said about it used as an “anticipatory subject in cleft sentences,”45 as in: It must have been here that I first met her.

In this example as well, it expresses an empty space as the place of what is being talked about. As subject it provides a support for the predicate so that the subordinate clause is made incident to that empty space, specifying what is talked about. Similarly for the sentence: I take it then that you’re resigning.

where it expresses an empty space as object of the verb in anticipation of the following clause being made incident to it. In other expressions, where no import is made incident to it, the pronoun represents the space occupied by some activity or other that both speaker and listener already have in mind: Take it easy! You’re in for it. Watch it!

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In uses involving coreference such as: I found a key and gave it to the security guard.

the pronoun also represents a space – the space already identified in the intended message by the preceding noun phrase – but not what occupies that space. These uses illustrate the traditional definition of pronouns as “substance without quality,” where substance is to be understood etymologically, “that which underlies phenomena” (oed, s.v. “substance,” 3), and quality whatever occupies that space. The upshot of all this is to justify Guillaume’s statement in the first year of his teaching that person is a “category of representation” by showing what cardinal person represents in the speaker’s ongoing experience. As we have seen, cardinal person in tongue has the capacity to represent space in the intended message, where “space” means the place of an object or anything else perceived spatially, including the mental space occupied by the intended message itself. It is this abstract representational link with the intended message, built into substantives and pronouns (even so-called “empty” it), that enables the listener, having understood the meaning expressed by a sentence, to refer it to a support in the message that the speaker has in mind. It is the abstract material import of each pronoun, determined by its position in its subsystem, which characterizes its cardinal person, thus enabling it to orient referential incidence. A substantive can carry out this referential function because, according to Guillaume, its cardinal person “is incorporated into the lexeme.”46 It is characterized by the lexeme because the way the lexeme is actualized calls for a spatial support with certain characteristics, such as unbounded or bounded. Cardinal person is also characterized by ordinal person, thereby situating the support with regard to the speaking relationship, as we have seen. Thus actualized, cardinal person provides the lexeme both with its internal support – the spatial component permitting the lexeme to be configured by the substantive’s grammatical categories, which in turn enable it to play its role as head of a noun phrase – and with its capacity for effecting referential incidence, often through a determiner. Our aim so far has been to examine a few of Guillaume’s scattered reflections on person in an attempt to understand his general view of person and discern what this implies for the substantive and the

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pronoun. This has led to the proposal that what substantives and pronouns have in common, permitting them to play the double role of support in syntactic incidence and “export” in referential incidence, is cardinal person, representing as the word’s internal support the space occupied by what is being talked about. In his lesson of 4 June 1948, Guillaume maintains that “the systematization of person is at the basis of tongue,” and permits distinguishing “the formal differences” between the substantive and other parts of speech.47 Here our task will again be one of trying to understand what he had in mind. How can person provide a basis for distinguishing between adjective, adverb, and preposition? Outside of the verb, his occasional remarks concerning person in the other parts of speech are little more than suggestions for further reflection. Since this will involve a careful scrutiny of hints and suggestions in Guillaume’s lecture notes, it will interest mainly those who want to deepen their understanding of his work and manner of exploring new problems. His reflections on the adjective, the adverb, the preposition, and the pronoun are summarized in the conclusion of this essay. The general theory of parts of speech in English that this results in is described in Essay 5. person and the adjective

Guillaume often pointed out that the mechanism underlying his theory of the parts of speech is incidence of an import of meaning to a support. In his lesson of 18 June 1948 he describes this mechanism as follows: “The phenomenon … called incidence is never anything but a seeking for the lexeme – or perhaps by the lexeme – of the support constituted by cardinal person.” Toward the end of the lesson he summarizes the discussion with the following cryptic remark: “Connection between the theory of the parts of speech and the theory of person. Start with the semantic characterization.”48 This is, to say the least, an unexpected starting point – the lexeme – for exploring such a general grammatical theory. A view expressed some four years earlier throws some light on it: “every lexeme provides in tongue first of all an import of meaning and this import, to be able to take its place in discourse, must find itself a support.”49 This entails a link between the lexical and the grammatical in each type of predicative word: the substantive’s semantic characterization (lexeme) seeking its support within its

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own representational range (extension), the adjective’s lexeme and the adverb’s lexeme seeking their support outside their own semantic range. That is, because the substantive’s lexical import represents the nature of what occupies its spatial support, it is incident to a support within its own range (internal incidence), whereas the adjective’s lexical import does not depict the nature of its support but is made incident to a support in a substantive (external incidence, first degree). Similarly, the adverb’s lexeme does not characterize the nature of its support; in a noun phrase it is also incident to the substantive’s support, but only indirectly (external incidence, second degree) through an adjective’s incidence. In the above citations, Guillaume seems to be suggesting that any attempt to explore the relation between person and part of speech, between cardinal person and each type of incidence, should start with the lexeme itself – that is to say, with the extent to which, in each case, the lexeme characterizes the support it seeks. On 17 December 1948 he takes up the question again by pointing out that person is the least studied and least known of the systems of tongue and yet no problem is more widespread. He continues his discussion as follows: “Person exists beneath the substantive, it is sought beneath the adjective, it exists in a special way beneath the verb, it is sought beneath the adverb and appears to be absent – extremely doubtful would perhaps be a better way of saying it – beneath the preposition.”50 We have already seen how person exists “beneath” (that is, provides a support for) the substantive’s lexical import. Presumably we are to understand that person is “sought beneath” the adjective and the adverb in the sense that lexemes formed by these parts of speech seek a spatial support in the representational field of their own lexical import but do not find one, hence their need to look elsewhere through external incidence. On the other hand, it cannot be assumed that there is no representation of person in the adjective or adverb, since Guillaume declares it absent (apparently) from the preposition only. Six months earlier he had declared this more categorically: “person is present and determining beneath every kind of word, with only one exception, that is the preposition.”51 How then should we understand person to be present in the adjective? Several years previously (1944), Guillaume considered the adjective to have “as determinant a negative person, sought within

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the lexeme but not found, which, because it is negative, becomes a person of agreement (personne de rapport), quite undetermined.” In the subsequent lesson he specifies that “negative person … is the support … of the adjective. This negative person, because it is in fact undetermined, has no rank,”52 i.e. no ordinal characterization. Thus when in 1948 he says that “the adjective brings in no determination of its support, and consequently no determination of cardinal person,” this should not be understood in the sense that cardinal person is absent, but rather, as he points out in the following lesson, that it is “sufficiently undetermined by the lexeme to leave person in discourse to be determined outside the semantic import.” In fact “the adjective is a word that has the property of imposing on the mind a search for cardinal person outside the semantic characterization that it imports,”53 but of course within the scope of a substantive’s semantic characterization. It seems then that, for Guillaume, it is the way person is represented within the adjective that imposes this search for a determination of its cardinal person outside its own lexical import, in that of a substantive. The usual view of grammars, that an adjective is said about a substantive because it expresses a quality, attribute, property, etc. of something, is a valid description of the function observed in syntax, but it offers no understanding of what in an adjective obliges its lexeme to find its support in a substantive, a word that represents its own support. As a result of his persistent questioning of the grammatical component distinguishing the parts of speech, and reflecting on examples such as choucroute maison54 (lit. sauerkraut home, i.e. homemade sauerkraut), Guillaume was led to propose cardinal person as the variable, calling it “negative” in the adjective as compared with the substantive. Thus person in the adjective is “undetermined, has no rank” (no ordinal person), but it finds a fully determined support when made incident to a substantive or pronoun. That is, the negative person of the adjective is actualized by finding a support in the person of a space word. This suggests that although the adjective’s lexeme characterizes its support incompletely, requiring a “search for cardinal person” outside its own field, it does characterize the support to the extent of imposing a limit on its external incidence: the adjective must find support in a word whose cardinal person is fully determined – in a space word, which is to say a substantive or pronoun.

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In fact, in French the adjective’s morphogenesis includes gender and number as categories to be actualized through its agreement with the substantive. In this the adjective differs from the adverb. person and the adverb

Adverbs are invariable, not found with morphological endings indicating agreement with another word. On the other hand, their syntactic relations are so diverse that Quirk et al. consider them “the most nebulous and puzzling of the traditional word classes.”55 From the point of view of diverse roles in the sentence and the capacity to establish incidence to such a variety of supports, the adverb is, as Guimier’s remarkable study shows, an exceptional part of speech, comparable only with the preposition. When examined from the point of view of person in the other lexical parts of speech (substantive, verb, adjective), however, its capacity for establishing such diverse syntactic relations becomes less puzzling. Guillaume discusses the adverb less frequently than the adjective. As early as 1940 he remarks: “The adverb is a fourth type of lexeme,” and goes on to point out that its incidence “cannot end ­directly in a word with internal incidence” (a substantive) but is “applicable only to words whose incidence is also external.” The adverb involves “external incidence of the second degree, which participates in another external incidence to find support there.” Like all words with external incidence, adverbs “seek a support outside themselves and end up finding it in a word with a stable support thanks to its internal incidence.”56 In a lesson some eight years later, 18 June 1948, while indicating how the adverb’s search for a support through external incidence differs from that of the adjective, he identifies the support sought as cardinal person: “Searching for incidence to cardinal person persists in the adverb. With this particularity that there is incidence to a seeking of incidence. This is what we call second degree incidence.” This incidence to an ongoing incidence is of course to be understood as the seeking of a support in the import of another word or phrase which is itself in the process of seeking an external support. In the subsequent paragraph he describes the adverb’s capacity for incidence as follows: “a search for cardinal person outside the vocable’s import starts further back (remonte) and is incident to another search also outside its vocable’s import. This mechanism is what

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characterizes the adverb. It leaves to the adverb’s semantic characterization its capacity to find ultimately (in finem) its cardinal person support. This capacity is withdrawn from the semantic characterization only if, going beyond the adverb among word types, the preposition is reached.”57 The implication here seems to be that cardinal person in the adverb is even less characterized by its lexical import than in the adjective. This in fact is what Guillaume suggests on 13 March 1952: “Substantive/adjective: the [lexical] substance finds its support in itself – a positive state [the substantive]; a negative state [the adjective] is not to find a support in itself. Adverb: still less support. Preposition: even less support.”58 This suggests that Guillaume saw the adjective’s support as less (minus) than that of the substantive, but not as absent. The adverb’s semantic characterization is not sufficient to determine its own support (as does the substantive’s) or even to focus it on a spatial support in another word (as does the adjective’s): it calls for no agreement in gender and number, “notional ideation + zero.”59 It has only the capacity to seek a spatial support through another word or phrase, itself in the process of seeking an external spatial support. This minimal semantic characterization of its spatial support thus appears to be the factor enabling the adverb not only to say something about something else, but to exercise this syntactic possibility indirectly through the incidence of an adjective or a verb or another adverb or any of the other operations of external incidence giving rise to the various syntactic relations observable in a sentence.60 For Guillaume, the preposition does not have this capacity of seeking support, directly or indirectly, in cardinal person, as we shall see. person and the system of p r e d i c at i v e pa r t s o f s p e e c h

Thus, to discern the connection between the theory of the predicative parts of speech61 and that of cardinal person, we have to go back to the commonplace that a lexical meaning is called to mind in order to be predicated, i.e. said about something. Here it is important to keep in mind the distinction between referential incidence (saying something about a support outside language, the referent in the intended message) and syntactic incidence (saying something about a support in the sentence) – important because the intended

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message exists in the speaker’s mind before the act of speech, whereas each intra-linguistic support is brought into existence by the speaker’s forming, (re)constructing, the words required to represent that extra-linguistic mental reality. Guillaume’s concern in the theory of the predicative parts of speech is therefore to discern how, during the act of speech, the grammatical systems of languages such as French and English enable a speaker to build into each of the required words the possibility of fulfilling the syntactic role foreseen for it in the prospective sentence. His point of view is, as always, not that of the listener interpreting a sentence but that of the prior condition of a speaker making the intended sentence. Guillaume thus postulates that the lexeme of each predicative part of speech seeks within the sentence a person-support as that about which it is to be said. In each case, the point to be clarified appears to be the degree to which the word’s lexical import, as actualized for a given use, can characterize its support. The substantive’s lexeme characterizes its cardinal person support as a space, unbounded or bounded, within its own representational range, and this calls for a further actualization of its person to give it an ordinal rank (usually third person). The adjective’s lexeme characterizes its person-support only as spatial, so the need to find an actualized space, a characterized space with ordinal rank, orients it toward the support provided by a substantive or pronoun. In the adverb, the person-support exists also as a goal to be attained but the lexeme does not characterize it even enough to indicate where it is to be found, and so the adverb must find its support in another word – an adjective, a verb, an adverb, or even a phrase – which is in the process of seeking a support. The very presence of cardinal person as actualized or sought in each of these parts of speech is, as we have seen, “the support that … every meaning import seeks for itself.”62 Moreover, when this support sought by the word’s meaning import is fully actualized in the substantive by an ordinal person, it provides a representation of a place in the intended message and so can ensure the referential incidence to that extra-linguistic reality. This view would seem to correspond to Guillaume’s answer to the question evoked above: “What is person fundamentally?” To get a clear view of it, it is useful to consider that each lexeme in tongue provides in the first place an import of meaning, which import, in order to take its place in discourse, must be said about something, must find a support. The lexeme provides a characterization of its

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support, a sort of “preview” of where to find it.63 We have seen above that cardinal person in substantives and pronouns can be understood as a potential for representing their spatial support characterized by their import, which then calls for an ordinal-person determination during their morphogenesis, which in turn enables them to fulfil their function in a sentence. Guillaume extends the discussion to other parts of speech when he considers the way person-support, as previewed in ideogenesis, provides a support for a word’s grammatical categorization during its morphogenesis. While reflecting on the different possibilities of syntactic incidence that are built into substantives and adjectives, he remarks: Incidence is an eventual situation depicted by anticipation in the word and linked to a category of representation … namely, person. In the apprehending phase [morphogenesis] which completes a word, there is always an indication of person, though one may be quite unaware of it; dependent on this indication is the anticipatively declared incidence to which the word owes, in part, its type. The person that the word incorporates by necessity in the apprehending phase which the grammarian focuses on – because almost all the word’s grammaticalization is grouped in it – the person the lexical word necessarily incorporates is either its own person or a person of agreement.64 When he goes on to remark that in the adjective “[t]he person incorporated is an undetermined person that becomes a person of agreement,” one is tempted to see a determination of the adjective’s cardinal person sought through agreement with the substantive. That is, the adjective does not incorporate an ordinal person as a determination of its cardinal person and so it must find it, as well as its number and gender, outside itself (as seen in French, Latin, etc.),65 whereas the substantive does determine its own cardinal person by means of ordinal person and so calls on the systems of morphogenesis to configure its lexeme with its person-support. As for the adverb, although its cardinal person incorporates neither ordinal person like the substantive’s, nor the capacity to agree in gender and number like the adjective’s, it does incorporate the potential for the adverb’s lexeme to seek a support in another word or phrase that is itself seeking a support.

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We have been observing the extent to which a lexeme is grammatically configured in morphogenesis in each of these three parts of speech, and have taken these observations as the basis for inferring the extent to which a word’s cardinal person is characterized by its lexical import in ideogenesis. If well-founded, this inference may help us to understand Guillaume’s unexpected suggestion cited above: “Connection between the theory of the parts of speech and the theory of person. Start with the semantic characterization.” It may also throw light on the operativity he had in mind in the same lecture when he spoke of “the dynamism of cardinal person”66 considered as an entity in tongue. Finally, this appears to be what Guillaume had in mind the following year, when he linked the word’s capacity for syntactic incidence, its part of speech, to person: And I maintain that the problem of the parts of speech – which moreover presupposes that of the word (of the theory of the word) solved – cannot be clarified without an exact consideration of the mechanism of incidence, which involves the problem of person, person being universally the support sought for the import of meaning used in discourse, sought early in tongue or later in discourse.67 On the basis of such passages from Guillaume, we have therefore proposed that cardinal person in tongue is a potential for representing a more or less defined spatial support for the lexeme. It remains to situate with regard to person the pronoun, which we will look at briefly below, and the verb, discussed in Essay 7. This leaves the problem of the preposition. person and the preposition

As we attempt to discern Guillaume’s understanding of the preposition, it will once again be useful to bring together some of his scattered comments. On 23 May 1940 he remarks that, from the point of view of incidence, the adverb is as far away from the substantive as possible and that “any further away would entail abolishing incidence to a support … a semantic support.” This is the case of the preposition, “which is the exemplum of a diastematic element, having its incidence between two lexemes,” and also the case of the conjunction.68 Later (4 June 1948), having seen that it is person that

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represents a support, he states: “A preposition is an entity of tongue without anything making it define person in any way.” The capacity to define person in discourse is, as we have seen, “withdrawn from the semantic characterization only if, going beyond the adverb among word types, the preposition is reached.” He continues: “The preposition as such is a word whose meaning is free from any incidence to cardinal person.” That is, the meaning it brings to the sentence cannot even characterize a support person indirectly the way an adverb’s does. At the end of the same lesson he insists that the preposition is quite distinct as a part of speech: “person is present and determining beneath every kind of word, with only one exception, that is the preposition.”69 If the manner in which person is present and characterized by the word’s import determines the other parts of speech, then it appears to be the absence of person that determines the preposition. All this indicates that a preposition is, as a part of speech, a word whose semantic import is not incident to a support person; and yet it links its noun phrase to a sentence component with or seeking a support. Since this would appear to contradict what Guillaume proposed in 1944, that “every meaning produced, every meaning import seeks for itself” a support,70 and reaffirmed five years later as a “fact of general grammar … that ultimately there cannot be an import without support,”71 it calls for a closer look at what he means by “support.” On 13 December 1951, Guillaume remarks that the preposition as constructed by the system in tongue is characterized by the fact of “falling, having incidence beyond any categorization, into a void.” In discourse, however, “the void a preposition falls into becomes an interval between two predicative terms,”72 a gap arising when a noun phrase is incapable of effecting syntactic incidence to a support outside itself. For example, there is a sort of syntactic void or gap between the two noun phrases in *there is an oak tree … the house, a gap that can be bridged by a preposition: behind the house, beside the house, etc. By making their notional import incident to this gap, their support, behind and beside name the relation between the two components, and through the syntactic potential provided by their part of speech make their noun phrase incident to the other component (here, an oak tree). Guillaume illustrates this by comparing similar examples with and without a preposition, as in the English sentence I’d like to send this parcel (by) air mail.73 He considers that “the syntactic mechanism of incidence is the same,” since in both

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versions the expression constitutes an “adverb of discourse.” That is, when the preposition is used it represents the relation as an operation making its noun phrase incident to the other component; when it is not used, it would seem that the nature of the relation – the manner of sending the parcel – is so obvious that the import case of the noun phrase air mail is enough to evoke it.74 Although this illustrates what a preposition does – it is incident to a syntactic gap or interval in discourse – it still does not clarify its status with respect to the presence of person. We have seen that person is found in all the other parts of speech, but that “one characteristic of the preposition in tongue would seem to be that it is a word expressing the dynamism of cardinal person in a way that avoids integrating person.”75 On the other hand, several months later Guillaume qualified person’s presence in the preposition as “extremely doubtful would perhaps be a better way of saying it.”76 He appears to be groping here for a clearer view of the preposition. We can see the similarity between the preposition and the operativity of cardinal person, its mechanism, which “is none other than the incidence of an import to a support,”77 but how the preposition can express this mechanism without representing cardinal person is not immediately obvious. Remarks from later lessons will throw light on this. On 6 December 1951, he says that the preposition “carries the mind outside the field of categorization and of that of predicativity,” that it is “non predicative by itself.”78 On 28 February 1957, he explains why prepositions, like conjunctions and negations, are non-predicative parts of speech: they have their incidence outside of what the sentence relates, to the very mechanism of the sentence … The predicative parts of speech are those whose incidence – internal, external 1 or external 2 – concerns the event the sentence relates. The parts of speech that are not predicative are those whose incidence concerns the mechanism of the event of constructing the sentence itself.79 That is, substantives, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs represent something in the intended message and so predicate something concerning it. What prompts recourse to a preposition is not something in the speaker’s intended message, in the happening the sentence

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relates, but something involved in the linguistic process of making the sentence: the need to fill a syntactic gap between two of its components. Since this gap has no counterpart in the experiential message, the preposition makes no call on cardinal person to permit reference to something in that message. That is, the preposition “avoids integrating” cardinal person because it has no correlate outside language, but this does not entail that it is “an import without support”: it represents as its support a syntactic gap, linking the two components and characterizing the relation between them. A preposition carries out syntactic incidence but not referential incidence. Such considerations, based on the view that cardinal person permits referential incidence to “what is spoken about,” would thus help us understand Guillaume’s position. He affirms that person is not present beneath the preposition, and yet it does express “the dynamism of cardinal person” because it represents as a spatial support a gap in which the relation represented by its lexical import can be actualized. This suggests that as a part of speech the preposition makes possible the operation of relating its noun phrase to a support outside itself, of spanning the syntactic gap in a way specified by its lexical import. The question can perhaps be clarified by contrasting the ordinary use of the preposition, where it makes a noun phrase incident to another sentence component, with a use where it does not fill a syntactic gap in this way, a use not discussed by Guillaume. In Under the bed is dusty the predicate is incident not to the noun phrase (the bed is not dusty) but to the prepositional phrase, which “has a ­nominal character; it functions as the grammatical subject of the subject of the sentence and now names a region in space.”80 The preposition represents a relation between its noun phrase and a space necessarily implied by the noun phrase. That is, thanks to under, the prepositional phrase is incident to a place not represented but necessarily present in the speaker’s intended message, and it is this place that provides a spatial support for the predicate. The prepositional phrase thus appears to make referential incidence possible by pointing to the place of a support for the predicate without representing the support. Is it this sort of usage that led Guillaume to consider the presence of person as “extremely doubtful” in the preposition? Before any such hypothesis can be entertained, the conditions governing what is, after all, an infrequent use of prepositions must be examined in detail. In any case, although

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he did not settle this and other questions, his comments and queries are invaluable when taken as suggested paths for further reflection and research whereby we may reach a clearer view of the preposition as a part of speech. person and pronouns

The above brief discussion of Guillaume’s view of the article as a means of representing extensity has provided the background for exploring what is involved in the substantive when he speaks of “this difference between cardinal person as the potential of extension and cardinal person as actualized extension.”81 He there identifies range of representation (extension) with person, cardinal person – a grammatical category – and in so doing indicates that, like any other grammatical category in tongue, person is to be conceived of as a potential, a range, offering variable actualizations, extensities, of this potential in discourse. When we say that comprehension determines extension, this dichotomy between potential and actual is not usually called to mind. In affirming that, during the ideogenesis of a substantive, the actualized lexical import characterizes its cardinal person to obtain the extensity required, Guillaume expresses this actualization in operative terms. All this leads to the view that cardinal person is a grammatical means for representing space, the space involved in the support required by any lexeme to be formed as a substantive. Moreover, person is also found in the article, whose role is to represent the substantive’s extensity.82 As already mentioned, this actualizing of cardinal person to represent the substantive’s extensity is not restricted to the article: demonstratives “are, like the article, pronouns which do not recall but rather announce the noun. Like the article, they serve as a support of extension for the noun.”83 Like the articles, demonstratives have always been “a morpheme signifying … a case of transition of the potential noun to the actualized noun, and therefore used to give a momentary definition in discourse of a certain nominal extension.”84 That is, demonstratives provide a spatial support for the substantive’s lexeme in a noun phrase, as do the articles, but unlike the articles they do not represent this space as merely an actualization of its range of representation. Rather, their frequent characterization as deictics reflects the fact that they also provide the representation of a stretch of space located somewhere within the purview of the

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speaker’s momentary state of consciousness, within the intended message. That is, the demonstrative can represent a substantive’s spatial support, its extent of application or extensity, as a place in the intended message related to the speaker’s place (cf. this vs. that). Granted this important difference, both article and demonstrative incorporate cardinal person representing the space occupied by what the substantive’s lexeme represents, by what is being talked about. Both function as determiners, completive pronouns, providing an actualized support for the lexeme, thereby permitting the substantive to complete its internal incidence and bring the construction of the noun phrase to a close. This is why Guillaume calls determiners completive pronouns, as opposed to suppletive pronouns, those that can be used independently. The possessives mon, ton, etc. in French are also completive pronouns providing a support for the substantive’s import of meaning: “This support, whose nature the substantive declares by itself, has its extension [= extensity] determined by the said pronouns.”85 Although the English possessives are by no means identical to their French counterparts, they do appear to play the same support role in the noun phrase. The same can be said of the completive pronouns some and any since, as partitive quantifiers, they too provide a spatial support for their substantive.86 In fact, completive pronouns “intervening in the very mechanism of nominal incidence in such a way as to regulate its functioning”87 all play a role in the noun phrase similar to that of the article. This amounts to proposing that these pronouns also incorporate cardinal person, since “support and person are two terms for designating one and the same thing.”88 This leads to the claim that “the constant presence of this third [cardinal] person beneath all ordinally marked persons is the fact universally underlying the organization of the system of person and the related system of the pronoun.”89 In a later year, Guillaume begins a lesson as follows: “The category of the pronoun as a whole is a grasping of the totality of the thinkable by means (sous le rapport) of person,”90 and goes on to discuss how space contains “a spatial being” and is “consubstantial” with it,91 distinguishing thereby the space that contains any being (as opposed to any happening) from the space contained in and occupied by that being. Recognizing the widespread presence of cardinal person in this way brings out not only what substantives and pronouns have in common, namely the capacity to represent the space occupied by

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something in the intended message, but also what differentiates them, namely that the substantive represents the nature of what occupies that space, but the pronoun does not. In this sense, “[a] pronoun does not represent, it refers: it indicates in a mental space, in a referential field, a position, an extension, and in that way, indirectly, it designates.”92 It also brings out why determiners are in fact pronouns:93 they signify “substance without quality,” the space underlying, appropriated by, something in the intended message without specifying its nature, thus providing a support for the internal incidence of a substantive’s lexeme representing its nature. p e r s o n a n d t h e r e p r e s e n tat i o n o f s pa c e

The proposal basic to our discussion of pronouns is that their cardinal person represents the space occupied by what is being talked about as well as the space containing it as represented by each subsystem of pronouns (articles, demonstratives, etc.). This was advanced above to explain what makes completive pronouns, and noun phrases in general, capable of referential incidence. Viewed in the framework of the commonplace that we always talk about something, it helps justify Guillaume’s insight in 1942 that “the category of person … [is] a primordial category, whose importance, which is extreme, we were not able to discern up to now.”94 In order to appreciate more fully this view, it is worth tracing briefly how it developed, how a generalized notion of space and a clear view of cardinal person representing it gradually formed from his initial view of person as one of the “categories of representation” (along with gender and number) arising from the “space substratum.”95 The following year, this idea of a space substratum is developed in a discussion of the search for a means of representing space in our languages (as opposed to languages with classifiers) by generalizing from our experience of particular entities: the constructing of space, the support of all that exists, starting with what exists … a spatializing of space: a construction in its particular cases arising directly from the general case … Then when the view of space is sufficiently instituted in the mind – a view of pure space free from any affinity with the particular, an image of undifferentiated extent, regardless of what it contains.96

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It is significant that here the “particular cases” opposed to the general representation of space are number and gender, but not person. Guillaume ends the general discussion by observing that our languages “spatialize space directly[,] avoiding as much as possible, in this spatialization, reference to that perceivable universe whose general support is the space mentally evoked.”97 One can sense here his searching for how this “general case” of space is “spatialized,” represented, how space as the “the support of all that exists” is “mentally evoked”; but his more abstract view of person did not come immediately. In the first lesson of 1941–42 he introduces the schema for the article98 and discusses the variation in extensity of the article, viewing it as a spatial part of speech, but as yet he does not see the link between article and person. Later that year, in discussing the personal pronouns in French, he points out that je and tu, “which constitute the speaking relationship,” also express “the objective person (supposedly absent) spoken about,”99 thus hinting at the distinction between cardinal person and ordinal person to come a year later. Before that, however, while reflecting on person, he discusses the link between “the expression of time and that of person” and raises the basic question: “What is person?” The answer, although somewhat abstract, goes to the root of the matter: “Person is the experience that the self [le moi] has of the self, transported more or less readily to the beyond-self [le hors-moi]. This transporting is what gives persons their order.”100 Other linguists had already proposed a similar distinction as the basis for person. In 1911, Boas and Powell pointed out that “our three persons of the pronouns are based on the two concepts of self and not-self.” In 1836, Humboldt proposed “that person-words must have been primary in every language … The first thing is naturally the personality of the speaker himself, who stands in continuous and direct contact with nature, and cannot possibly fail, even in language, to set over against the latter expression of his self.”101 If “nature” is interpreted here as the equivalent of “not-self” in Boas and “beyond-self”102 in Guillaume, all three linguists appear to be making the same distinction, but to my knowl­ edge Guillaume is the only one to develop this insight in exploring grammatical person as a basic element of language. He presupposes the germinal distinction between the continuous consciousness of Self as opposed to the intermittent awareness of

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anyone or anything else. That is, he postulates that, like any speaker, my being aware of my own Self entails my distinguishing it from my experience of everything and everyone that is not me, including you (the person[s] I address) and any other person or thing I can talk to or about. Separating Self from the Beyond-Self involves distinguishing the experience one has of one’s own existence from the experience one has of the existence of everyone and everything else. As part of his answer to his own question about the nature of grammatical person, Guillaume describes how this mental distinction is made: [T]he beyond-self is a view (vision) in expansion, a view which extends to everything which is not the self – the narrow self – a view extending to the whole unlimited exterior. This extensive, expansive view, if made incident to itself, generates in the mind the notion of space. It suffices to make the unlimited beyond-self incident to itself for the notion of space to be instituted in the mind.   Contrary to the beyond-self – no opposition is more categorical than this one – the self is a narrowing view: a view which, to define itself, gets rid of everything that is not strictly itself. The self seeks itself and only finds itself when it cannot remove anything else from itself to the beyond-self. It is then the narrow self, the personal self, the singular self, with nothing identical to it.103 All this suggests that the self is what remains when one’s momentary field of consciousness is narrowed down to focus on what cannot be left out: the constant experience of one’s own self. Moreover, this operation of discrimination delimiting the space occupied by the self is a prerequisite for the expanding movement to be able to extend “to everything which is not the self.” That is, there is a necessary temporal link between these two movements making them a single binary operation suggestive of what Guillaume was later to call the radical binary tensor. This can be depicted by the following figure. The first vector depicts restricting the momentary field of consciousness to its minimal scope, a space limited to that occupied by the self, depicted here by S; the second vector depicts going beyond that minimal scope and expanding the field of consciousness to take in the unlimited space occupied by anyone or anything beyond the self.

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S

beyond-self

field of consciousness



This figure, which does not appear here in Guillaume’s text,104 is introduced here as an interpretation of his descriptions of the two processes involved in separating self from beyond-self. A few lessons later, continuing his reflections, he affirms: The category of person … is … a primordial category whose importance, which is extreme, has not been seen up to now. This importance can be glimpsed and even discerned if one just considers that the category of person proceeds from the separation of the self from the beyond-self, an operation of thought indispensable for the creation of language itself.105 It is a necessary mental precondition for human beings to institute their mother tongue, a condition permitting them to represent and to speak about something, about anything they have in mind. What is implied here is that human language itself is based on the exercise of a prior mental capacity enabling one to become conscious of one’s self. This makes language, from its very inception, essentially a mental construct. Only when this pre-linguistic discrimination of self within our field of consciousness has been realized can the means of representing our ongoing experience be instituted. In fact, some five years later, in 1948, Guillaume was to postulate106 that the above schema depicts the type of binary mental operation for structuring language systems in general: only the capacity of particularizing opposed to its counterpart, the capacity of generalizing,

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can make available a constant for organizing one’s ever-changing experience in order to represent and express it. In view of this fundamental relation between thought and language, he was led to remark later that year that “the relating of the Self to the Beyond-Self makes human civilization as a whole.”107 But let us get back to Guillaume’s reflections on the category of person. In his lesson of 5 March 1942, he brings in the role of incidence: It belongs to the human person, which has discriminated itself by de-identifying itself from the beyond-self, to identify itself with regard to itself; this entails an incidence of person to itself. Only then is the category of person founded. In the mind there exists a self which is able to relate itself to itself, which is aware of existing in the field of what it signifies.108 In this difficult passage Guillaume appears to be groping to see how the mind can find a means of representing the omnipresent awareness of self. What does he mean by identifying self with itself, an incidence of person to itself? A step toward the solution is found a few weeks later when he attributes to the infinitive and participles a “generalized person [which] condenses in itself the three persons. They exist in it potentially separated. (It is only the potentiality of this separation.)”109 This introduces a two-phase view of person, as a potential and as an exploitation of the potential. Toward the end of his other lecture series of 1941–42, Guillaume returns to the general question of the system of person: A major fact will be dominant in the explanations of this subject to be presented. It is that the structure of every tongue is fundamentally based on the separation of two spheres, the subjective sphere of the Self and the objective sphere of the Beyond-Self … Ordinal variation consists of the changing of rank of person presenting itself successively first, second and third as it moves away from the Self toward the Beyond-Self. It is perhaps significant that he capitalizes these two terms from this moment on as he seeks a way of naming the potential person he had perceived. He evokes the Beyond-Self as an “objective third person,” not alternating with persons of another rank, and later makes the

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distinction between “two states of the third person,” ordinal and “extra-ordinal,” the latter “as extensive as the Beyond-Self.”110 Implied in all this is the distinction between person as a constant presenting itself in different aspects, or masks. Some six months later, during a discussion of the substantive he sees that this “fixed rank 3rd person” provides a support for the other categories (gender, number, etc.). He then goes on to distinguish clearly between ordinal person with its variable threefold rank and “extra-ordinal person with invariable rank … what I will henceforth call cardinal person – which supports synthetic case, gender, number.” Recognizing this relation between cardinal and ordinal persons permits him to discern the substantive’s “interior duality … the lexeme in itself and the cardinal person to which it is incident,” as we saw above, and permits us to see why his definition of the article is based on “this difference between cardinal person as the potential of extension and cardinal person as actualized extension.”111 All this brings out a development in Guillaume’s understanding of the role of cardinal person in the grammatical forming of words: as a potential, cardinal person is a means of representing that view of “pure space” seen as the container of any spatial entity to be actualized to represent the particular space occupied by a given entity when the speaker is forming a word. The following year, when he sees that “almost all the grammaticalization of the word is found gathered together [in] the person which a lexical word necessarily includes,” this insight permits him to characterize112 the relation between lexeme and person as that of import to support and to propose this as a basis for distinguishing between substantive and adjective, and subsequently the other parts of speech, as described above. This is a significant achievement for languages such as French and English, particularly since parts of speech are so often considered merely a convenient way of classifying words rather than a means of configuring their lexical import to enable them to carry out their syntactic function. As pointed out, however, his claim for person as a fact of general grammar goes far beyond this. He makes an even wider claim when he remarks: The day we reconsider, from the point of view of thought, linguistic studies in general, this question of making the lexeme incident to the space-universe will, I am convinced, constitute

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the main chapter. It arose the day language arose; it will remain posed as long as there is language.113 Referring to our common experience that things exist in space, a “space substratum,” “the support of all that exists,” he assumes that this is reflected, represented in some way, in the particular structure of every human language. That is, to represent any entity, including oneself, the mind must see it in the universe of space, and cardinal person is the grammatical means of representing this relation. He even extends this to the mental capacity permitting the institution of language in the mind: a primordial human problem, born with human thought itself, whose solution gives the human mind its main condition of potency … In a word, the problem of person … is the essential problem of the Self confronting the Beyond-Self.114 Several years later Guillaume pursued his reflections on space and time in an essay subtitled Space and Time in Common Thought and in the Structures of Tongue.115 As always, he focuses on language as a human phenomenon, explicitly avoiding any speculations not directly involved in it. That is, he is not concerned with space and time in scientific or philosophical thought but in the ordinary speaker’s experience and thinking. In fact, he considered the abstract means of representation provided by tongue a sort of “pre-science” providing “the latent basis”116 for raising certain questions in science. Depending on the language, this representation of space is more or less generalized. As we have seen for English, cardinal person can represent any entity’s space in the speaker’s intended message. conclusion

Nothing guarantees that my interpretation of Guillaume’s scattered comments concerning person is valid in all respects. There are no doubt other passages that have escaped my attention and there remain several years of his lecture notes to be published. Besides, several other questions have yet to be examined, notably that of the preposition. Furthermore, the view that cardinal person is inherent in the makeup of the pronoun as a part of speech has yet to be explored in each of its subsystems (interrogatives, indefinites, etc.).

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The system of the personal pronouns, the clearest expression in English of ordinal person, will be addressed in Essay 8. Our discussion so far has nevertheless produced some worthwhile hints concerning the makeup of the system of person. Thanks to Guillaume’s insights, it does seem feasible to propose that the ordinal persons are different masks or actualizations of cardinal person because they situate cardinal person, a constant in the act of representation, with regard to a constant in the act of expression, the speaking relationship. This in turn leads to the view that person is a two-phase system of representation wherein cardinal person arises before ordinal person. Furthermore, this helps explain why ordinal person is found only in the substantive and the pronoun. The link Guillaume recognizes between person and extensity as expressed by the article and other determiners brings out the pivotal role of cardinal person: in syntactic incidence it provides the ultimate support of the noun phrase, and in referential incidence it provides an import seeking a support in the intended message. Moreover, the way Guillaume views the presence of person in the adjective and the adverb implies that it can be variously actualized, thus suggesting a “dynamism,” an operativity within cardinal person itself, whereby it provides a more or less adequate support for the lexical import of a word. In a former study (in 2009) I proposed cardinal person as the cornerstone of the noun phrase. The present essay has brought out the basis for this proposal and has situated it in the general framework of the act of language. Viewing cardinal person not only as the spatial support in a noun phrase but also as representing the space in the intended message occupied by something talked about brings out what led Guillaume to propose that “person, the systematization of person, is at the basis of tongue, and that everywhere, in every language.”117 That is, granted the commonplace that we always talk about something, and granted that person represents its place in the intended message, then person must be omnipresent, varying according to the degree of systematization involved. The fact that the way person is systematized to represent space in French and English substantives cannot be presumed for all languages, suggested to Guillaume that the representation of space in any language is the result of a gradual historical development. This appears to be reflected in Michael’s observation that the phrase “is a c­ategory which cannot be said to exist, in grammar, until modern times”118

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and borne out by Hewson and Bubenik’s detailed study of the phrase’s development in Indo-European languages. One cannot help but wonder if the noun phrase itself appeared as a grammatical entity only after there arose in tongue a clear distinction between cardinal and ordinal person, the image of that “pure space free from any affinity with the particular” as Guillaume described it. From this historical point of view, Guillaume observed in Indo-European languages the connection between the reduction in the number of cases in the declension and the emergence of the article, which, as we have seen, he considered to provide the clearest, most abstract representation of a substantive’s extensity, of its cardinal person. In the essay mentioned above, he reflects on a purely formal vision of the universe emptied of matter, and the human thinking person opposing the narrow finitude of its own form to the formal infinitude of the universe. This gives the quite unique opposition of finite man confronting by thought the infinite universe. “Thus my person, which is a finitude of space withdrawn from infinite space, is made of the space it appropriates to itself. It is not made out of time whose infinitude is not consubstantial to it.”119 Elsewhere he describes this relationship: “The basic contrast is a reciprocal one, that between a physical universe, man’s place of existence, and man, the place of existence of a non-physical mental universe confronting it.”120 These considerations help us to appreciate why Guillaume considered person to be a universal in language.

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5 Person, Space, and Parts of Speech in the Noun Phrase

introduction

The intent of this essay is to adopt Guillaume’s view that the grammatical makeup of a word conditions its syntactic function in discourse, and to apply his insights to three parts of speech in English. Not all linguists even believe syntactic relations to be meaningful, but, to my knowl­edge, of those who do, only Guillaume has undertaken to analyze a word’s grammatical import as a prior condition explaining its syntax. This essay will summarize and expand upon the main results of the preceding essay, tracing the development of Guillaume’s reflections concerning the substantive, the adjective, and the adverb. (The verb and the pronoun will be discussed in Essays 7 and 8.) As a summary, it will reflect some of the discussion in the previous essay that clarified his reasoning for proposing the category of person as basic to the system of the parts of speech; but it will perhaps bring out more clearly how his approach enables us to penetrate the “closed watch” words of English. Words confront us with an endless variety of lexical and phonetic manifestations. To deal with the word from a general point of view, one is constrained to begin by observing its grammatical manifestations. Words are usually grouped in several grammatical “classes,” groupings better designated by the expression “parts of speech” because they are generally recognized by the syntactic role they play as parts of a sentence. Furthermore, this expression suggests not just different sets of individual words, but individual categories based on certain general criteria differentiating words grammatically. Since it is the interplay of their syntactic relations that creates

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the unit of speech or writing, i.e. the sentence, it is important to discern what in a word’s grammatical makeup enables it to exercise a given syntactic function during the production of a sentence. In a language such as Latin, a word’s syntactic role is readily observable because of the declension of nouns, both adjectives and substantives. In English, however, all that remains of the declension in the substantive is the -ø/-s of number.1 Other general components can nonetheless be observed. Gender, dependent on the lexeme, is often considered a latent category, and so is the third person, arising from the “space substratum.” The mass/count distinction manifested in all uses of the substantive is generally considered in grammars to be a lexical rather than a grammatical dichotomy, as is the common/proper distinction. Finally, logicians have long recognized that a substantive’s comprehension, its lexical import, determines its extension, its range of representation. Although only number is recognized by its morphology, all these general characteristics would seem to be involved in the substantive as a part of speech. To bring out how they arise from the same basis in the substantive, we will explore Guillaume’s view of it as a space word. t h e s u b s ta n t i v e a s a s pa c e w o r d

Guillaume’s general principle for lexical words is that their lexeme represents something in a speaker’s intended message, and this constitutes the word’s import of meaning. For one linguist, “a noun refers to a thing (in the most general sense of that term).”2 Guillaume realized that a substantive’s lexeme, declined -ø/-s for grammatical number, must be configured for space, continuate or discontinuate, to distinguish between singular and plural. That is, the lexeme of a substantive, representing what the word talks about, be it concrete like chair, immaterial like idea, or abstract like honesty, is grammatically categorized for space. His discovery in 1942 of the mental system underlying number in French had confirmed its spatial nature and the substantive’s capacity to express various actualizations of a lexeme’s extension, various extensities3 of the lexeme. His view of person in the substantive coincides with that of other grammarians:4 third person is to be defined as ‘outside the speaking relationship (speaker addressee)’ and not, as is sometimes proposed, ‘that which is spoken about,’ since all three persons speak about someone or something. This led him to the key idea that underlying

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the ordinal (first, second, third) persons there is a more general version of person, a what-is-spoken-about person common to all three, and therefore common to all substantives and pronouns as well. It is this potential, unspecified person that is actualized by ordinal person in every use of a substantive to represent the space involved in the lexeme’s extensity, the space to be configured singular or plural in the substantive’s grammatical configuration. He spoke of this generalized person, opposing it to ordinal person with its variable threefold rank, as “extra-ordinal person with invariable rank … what I will henceforth call cardinal person.”5 The term “cardinal” suggests what is central or basic to the system of person, what can be realized in and expressed by any of the three ordinal persons. Generally actualized as third person in a substantive, cardinal person is the means of representing how much of a lexeme’s range of representation (= extension) is being talked about in any given use. In every use a substantive’s lexeme is said about something occupying a portion, or all, of its own range of representation.6 That is, as the grammatical realization of the traditional comprehension extension relation in each use of a substantive, cardinal person is the means of representing the lexeme’s extensity, the space occupied by the particular scope a lexeme talks about in a particular act of speech. Thus it is proposed that, while a substantive is being formed, cardinal person represents its lexeme’s extensity as the spatial basis or support the lexeme is to be said about in that sentence. This makes the substantive a word that, like any other word, brings to the sentence its own import of meaning, but that also brings with it the support it is said about, a part of speech with internal incidence.7 A lexeme, actualized to represent some entity in the speaker’s intended message, is thus applied to some portion (or all) of its own extension. The specific traits of the actualized lexeme characterize the space involved in its extensity-support. A clear manifestation of a substantive’s lexical import characterizing its person-support is the  distinction between unbounded and bounded space in usage. Actualizing a lexeme in a ‘mass’ sense characterizes its support space as unbounded; actualizing a lexeme in a ‘count’ sense characterizes its support space as bounded.8 Cardinal person thus characterized by its lexeme provides the spatial component in a substantive to be configured during its morphogenesis by the system of number. Moreover, if cardinal person in the substantive represents the

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extensity of its lexeme and gives the substantive internal incidence, then this is what enables it to function as the head of a noun phrase. the adjective

Internal incidence is what distinguishes the substantive as a part of speech. The adjective is a part of speech characterized by external incidence because it “describes a noun” (as teaching grammars usually put it): that is, its lexical import is said about something outside its own range of representation. This is why it does not function as the head of a noun phrase. Guillaume spoke of the adjective as a word with “negative person,” a word whose lexical import does not find a spatial support to be incident to within its own representational range. In French, the fact that the adjective agrees with the substantive in gender and in number indicates that the adjective does include a spatial component, but one not sufficiently characterized by its own lexeme to provide a support for itself. As a consequence, an adjective’s lexeme cannot be configured for a gender (feminine or masculine) or a number (singular or plural) unless it is made incident to a substantive’s lexeme. Thus it would appear that a  lexeme grammaticized as an adjective does not characterize its ­support space to the same degree as does a lexeme grammaticized as a substantive. The fact that there is no longer agreement in English might be interpreted as indicating that there is no longer any support space, any cardinal person, in the adjective, but this would make it difficult to explain the overriding fact of the adjective’s syntactic potential. As in French, the adjective in English must find a support for its lexeme in the lexeme of a substantive, in the head of a noun phrase or in the subject of a copula verb. In comparison, the syntactic potential of the adverb, which can be incident to practically any type of word except a substantive, is considerably greater. This suggests that there is person in the adjective, person sufficiently characterized by its lexeme to direct it to a space word for a support but not enough so to characterize its own spatial support as unbounded or unbounded, as the substantive does. Though incomplete, person in the adjective gives a representation of support space sufficient to constrain the lexeme to find a spatial complement in a substantive. Assuming that cardinal person is a component of the adjective also helps explain a certain usage. Although there is no longer agreement

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in English, it is not uncommon to find lexemes representing some quality or property used not as an attribute in a noun phrase but as a phrasal head – for example, the unknown, or the extremely poor – and even as subject – Small is beautiful. The interesting point here is that these expressions can be paraphrased ‘what is unknown,’ ‘those who are extremely poor,’ ‘whatever is small,’ paraphrases indicating that the three words express, albeit vaguely, what they talk about. Here it appears that the word’s lexeme has been actualized to express not just a particular quality but, depending on context and situation, what it is a quality of: which is to say, an extensity. This implies that in such uses the lexeme characterizes its spatial support more fully than in its usual attributive uses as an adjective, to the point where the lexeme’s support can be extended beyond the word’s ideogenesis into its morphogenesis and be configured by number and gender. That is, in uses such as these, the lexeme has been formed as a substantive with internal incidence whose function – head of a noun phrase or subject of the verb – is expressed by its position in the sentence. Examples of this type will be discussed in Essay 6. the adverb

How about the adverb? Its ability to establish a syntactic relation through external incidence with verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, etc. would seem to indicate that it has no built-in representation of its support in discourse. In fact, like the adjective the adverb has no distinctive morphology,9 but unlike the adjective it is variously positioned in the sentence according to whatever word, phrase, or clause it is incident to. This led Guillaume to propose that the adverb seeks a support in (is incident to) any other word, phrase, etc. which is itself seeking a support. This might suggest that the adverb is a word with no built-in morphogenesis, no grammatical configuring of its lexeme, something like the interjection Wow! But the distinctive property of interjections is their lack of syntactic potential, their incapacity to establish a syntactic relation with other words in a sentence; adverbs, on the other hand, have a broader range of potential syntactic relations than any other part of speech. The striking contrast between adverbs and interjections calls for reflection on what in an adverb’s grammatical makeup enables it to relate to syntactic units of such variety, constrained of course by its own lexical import.

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The limitation on the adverb’s syntactic relations mentioned above must reflect something in its makeup. The fact that, as a part of speech, it does not find a support in a substantive suggests that an adverb has a spatial constraint in its syntactic potential. This implies that an adverb does have a spatial component as a grammatical formative, a component which, as in the adjective, cannot provide the lexeme with its own spatial support, but which, unlike the corresponding component of the adjective, cannot even allow the adverb to be incident to a word which would complete its support space. It can only be incident to a verb, adjective, adverb, phrase, etc. – that is, to a syntactic unit which must itself find an outside support.10 The lexeme of an adverb must be said about something outside itself, something seeking through external incidence its own support. This is, compared with the adjective, a second degree of external incidence, and would seem to suggest that the adverb’s spatial component is even less developed than that of the adjective, which as we have seen is incomplete compared with that of a substantive. the system

Comparing the syntactic behaviour of substantive, adjective, and adverb on the basis of the common parameter of cardinal person giving each word’s lexeme an interiorized spatial support suggests a threefold development: – a fully developed support so that the lexeme is said about something within its own representational range, resulting in a word with internal incidence: a substantive; – a partially developed support so that the lexeme is said about something spatial outside its own representational range, resulting in a word with external incidence: an adjective; – a minimally developed support so that the lexeme can be said about most anything non-spatial outside its own representational range, resulting in a word with second-degree external incidence: an adverb. Considered from the general point of view of what each word’s meaning is said about in the sentence, the function of a part of speech appears to be that of bringing its lexeme to what it is being said about, ensuring the transport of a word’s import of meaning to

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its support. The idea of incidence underlying these parts of speech is thus one of situating a meaning, giving each lexeme its place, in the notional construct being expressed by the sentence. One may well consider the idea of incidence not as an explanation of the syntactic behaviour of these three parts of speech but merely as a convenient manner of summarizing what goes on behind the scenes. It is, however, an attempt to describe what appear to be the mental operations required to integrate diverse notions into the meaning of a sentence. Incidence, the idea of making a word’s meaning import “fall upon” the support it is said about, should therefore be viewed from the more general viewpoint of its place in the act of speech. Speakers (or writers) undertake an act of speech in order to express something they have in mind, an intended message. Their intent to construct a unit of expression, a sentence, entails forming one by one the words required – required both to represent something in the intended message by means of their lexeme and to integrate through their syntactic potential with the lexemes of other words so that they result in the expression of a single notional unit, “a complete thought.” The process of representing involves dividing the message into parts by means of the most appropriate lexemes, and the process of grammatically configuring each lexeme ensures the amalgamating of these meaning imports into a notional whole representing the intended message. The notion of incidence is thus an attempt to depict how this assembling process takes place, how each lexeme finds a support meaning and merges with it to contribute to the whole. For example, to form the noun phrase an extremely small particle, the adverb’s external incidence of the second degree enables its lexeme to find a support in and merge with the adjective’s lexeme so that the resulting notion extremelysmall, with the adjective’s firstdegree external incidence, finds a support in the substantive’s lexeme and merges with it to produce the notion of the noun phrase extremelysmallparticle. The point here is that there is only one entity, not three, in the speaker’s mind, in the intended message, but our language calls for three lexemes to represent it adequately and so requires the syntactic processes of incidence to reassemble them in a mental whole corresponding to the speaker’s experience. Our discussion of the substantive’s internal incidence has brought out that it is the result of the lexeme characterizing its spatial support represented by cardinal person, its extensity, to the point of imposing either an unbounded or a bounded version of the space

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involved. The adjective’s external incidence is the result of the lexeme characterizing its spatial support enough to impose the need to complete it in a space word, a substantive, but not enough to provide its own support. And the adverb’s second-degree external incidence results from its lexeme minimally characterizing its support. The minimal spatial support provided by its cardinal person imposes on the adverb’s lexeme the need to seek the support it is said about in another word (or phrase) that is itself seeking an outside support. This attempt to find a common denominator for the different syntactic possibilities of the three parts of speech is based on the commonplace observation that every meaning is produced to be said about something, that every import of meaning must find a support. Furthermore, the proposal that it is cardinal person that provides this support is based on the observation that the substantive’s spatially configured lexeme provides its own internal support as well as an external support for an adjective’s lexeme and indirectly for an adverb’s.11 Compared on the abstract level of a spatial support characterized by a lexeme, this approach helps us understand why an adverb’s syntactic possibilities – what it can be said about – are so extensive, whereas an adjective’s are so limited and a substantive can only be said about itself. Most importantly, this essay attempts to show that a part of speech is a meaningful grammatical category configuring the word’s lexeme, and to sketch the system relating substantive, adjective, and adverb. Our extrapolation of this system is based on the principle that, as words, each of these components is constructed by the speaker with a lexeme representing something in the intended message, and with a part of speech enabling the word to function as a syntactic unit in the construction of a sentence. The discussion so far has been quite general and leaves many issues to be examined, a few of which are addressed in subsequent essays; but a small problem of usage will be examined here as a test of the system. testing

Like any theory, this system must be confronted with observed facts of usage that appear to conflict with it. The use to be discussed here is sometimes described as “an adjective used as a noun” and so calls into question Guillaume’s view that a lexeme formed as an adjective cannot be used as a word with internal incidence (a substantive). As

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argued in the first essay, a word must be configured by a part of speech in order to have its place as a syntactic unit in discourse. (Essay 6 will deal with the more general problem of “a substantive used as an adjective.”) In Part II of his Grammar of Modern English, Jespersen devotes a chapter to the use of “adjectives as principals.” He observes that “[t]he chief living use of the adjective as a principal is with the definite article to denote a whole class … either in the s[in]g[ular], in which case it is neuter, or in the pl[ural], in which case it denotes living beings: the known = ‘everything known’; the poor = ‘all poor people.’” That this does not make these adjectives “into a substantive … is shown by the possibility of qualifying them by means of an adverb: the really poor … the relatively unknown.”12 Here as elsewhere, Jespersen’s observation of usage is quite exceptional and his discerning of problems posed is a challenge,13 but in this case his classification leaves us with a difficulty, as does that of Huddleston and Pullum, who also consider poor to be an adjective here, used in a “fused-head construction,” because it can have very as a modifier.14 The difficulty arises when Jespersen observes that adjectives used as “principals” (or, in his later terminology, “primaries”15) are either singular and neuter (inanimate) or plural and denoting living beings (animate). That is, to propose that an adjective in Modern English can express an inanimate/animate opposition implies that it is grammatically configured by the system of gender, like the substantive. And to propose that it can express a singular/plural opposition implies that it is grammatically configured by the system of number, like the substantive. This of course is not his intention, though it seems inescapable for a word in the third person functioning as a “primary,” as the head of a noun phrase. On the other hand, his argument that, like any other adjective, these examples are qualified by adverbs supports his view that they are adjectives. Thus observation of usage appears to give contradictory evidence: these words function as adjectives in one respect, as substantives in other respects. To reflect on this apparent contradiction in usage requires calling to mind something often neglected: the distinction between the type of word involved (adjective and substantive) and the syntactic role involved (lexical qualification by an adverb and head of a noun phrase). To help us keep this part of speech vs. function distinction in mind, it will be useful here to use the term substantive to designate a word as constructed with a part of speech vs. the term noun to

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designate the same word used in a syntactic function. A substantive is the outcome of the two-phase process of ideogenesis + morphogenesis (cf. Essay 3); a noun is the syntactic unit exercising certain relational possibilities. Let us now see if our method will help us determine whether unknown and poor in the above examples are adjectives or substantives. Granted that they not only express gender and number in discourse but also, as head of a noun phrase, play the role of a noun, we will conclude that they have been formed grammatically as substantives. On the other hand, relatively and really can only be classified as adverbs (granted the existence of relative and real as adjectives). The fact that adverbs can qualify other types of word – verbs, adjectives, other adverbs, etc. – but not substantives (or pronouns) appears to contradict this conclusion, hence the dilemma arising from observation of usage. Applying these general considerations to our two examples, the relatively unknown and the really poor, the first point to be noted is that the role of the two adverbs is to qualify the lexemes of unknown and poor, to express their degree: ‘to what extent unknown’; ‘how poor.’ As such, the adverbs intervene in the first phase of constructing unknown and poor, during their ideogenesis. That is, relatively and really contribute to actualizing the potential lexemes unknown and poor and thus are integrated into them. This suggests that it is the resulting lexical imports relativelyunknown and reallypoor which are submitted to the subsequent process of morphogenesis to be configured for a part of speech.16 The point is that the adverb’s lexeme here is not incident to another word, but to another lexeme which is itself seeking a support in order to become grammatically formed either as an adjective or as a substantive, an explanation based on the view that speakers must construct a word they want to use. This brings us back to the other question: adjective or substantive? In their ordinary use as adjectives, unknown and poor are actualized to apply the quality they represent to some spatial entity. This calls for their cardinal person to represent space as a support during their ideogenesis, but as lexemes they do not characterize their cardinal person to the point of determining its extensity. In their use as substantives, however, unknown and poor are actualized as occupying their own place in space, the space occupied by the entities necessarily implied, in the context, by the quality they express. That is, they represent their extensity, as evidenced by their article.

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This entails their cardinal person not only being characterized to represent space as their support, but going beyond this to characterize this space so that it can be configured for gender and number during their morphogenesis, categories ensuring “the final incidence of the substantive to space.”17 The very fact of configuring the lexeme and its support in this way leads to actualizing its cardinal person by ordinal person, here third person, which situates it outside the speaking relationship. The impression of actualizing a lexeme expressing a quality to the point where it characterizes its support space in this way can be illustrated by more recent uses such as the well-known book title Small Is Beautiful. Here small calls to mind ‘anything small,’ the whole range of entities that could be qualified as ‘small.’ That is, small has been formed as a third-person substantive ‘inanimate’ in gender, general in ‘singular’ number, functioning as support (subject) of the predicate, and expressing its total extension. Similarly, as substantives the known evokes ‘everything known’ and the poor evokes ‘all poor people,’ as Jespersen points out, but in those two examples their extension is of course limited by the incidence of the adverb, and may be even more limited by their context, which is not given by Jespersen. The point here is that, configured as adjectives, these lexemes require an outside support to indicate what they are talking about, whereas configured as substantives these lexemes indicate in a more or less general way their own support. They provide a particularly clear manifestation of the difference between external incidence and internal incidence proposed as the basic distinction between adjective and substantive. Furthermore, the use of relatively and really brings out not only that adverbs are incident to any notion seeking a support, but also that in these two examples they find their support during the ideogenesis of their support word, before its morphogenesis is triggered. Adopting Guillaume’s theory of the word in languages such as English has made it possible to propose this resolution of the dilemma arising from Jespersen’s observation of usage. It involves determining the grammatical input of each word, of each part of speech involved, in the light of its (latent) morphology and syntactic functions. Relating the parts of speech to a common component – the degree to which a spatial support is represented by cardinal person – brings out their underlying system and provides a basis for explaining how the same lexeme can be actualized to provide grammatically

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different words. Some theory of the parts of speech appears to be necessary to explain syntactic problems such as the one discussed here, to explain what permits grammaticizing a lexeme in different ways according to what the speaker wants to represent and express. That is, to get beyond merely describing a syntactic relation and to attempt to actually explain it, one must come to understand the makeup of the words involved. Only then can one explain how a speaker produces what appears to be a contradiction: an adverb characterizing a substantive.

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6 Case as a Grammatical Category in Modern English

introduction

There are many approaches to case on a theoretical level. Blake, for example, defines case as “a system of marking dependent nouns for the type of relationship they bear to their heads,” a definition considered too restrictive by Butt.1 In her study involving “a comparative look at case across syntactic theories,” Butt considers case “a handy tool for marking semantic relationships between nouns and verbs, or more generally between dependents and a head,” a view that may also be too restrictive, as we shall see. Most of the “primarily syntactically oriented” approaches she examines are concerned with “crosslinguistic factors.”2 According to Schlesinger, “the current conception of cases rests on the implicit assumption that it is possible to categorize relations that are ‘out there’ … there have been proposals comprising as few as three … up to an estimated forty to fifty categories.”3 Here, our concern will be limited to Modern English. Most grammars of English discuss case in the context of the personal pronouns and the nominal -’s, which is generally dubbed the “genitive case,” as opposed to the “common” case of the substantive. They take for granted the subject and object roles of noun phrases in English, and the fact that in the sentence these functions are usually expressed by position in relation to the verb. Some grammars mention in passing noun phrases as adverbials, as in He went that way, and “nouns used as attributive modifiers” as in noun phrase, but to my knowl­edge none show how the same grammatical category of the substantive’s “common” case can give rise to such varied syntactic roles for the noun phrase.4

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Dictionaries have defined grammatical case in different ways. Webster’s Third calls case “an inflexional form indicating a sense relation to another word in the context.” For the oed, case is “the relation itself whether indicated by distinct form or not.” Anderson brings out “the ambivalence of the term ‘case’, as denoting either the relations (semantic or grammatical) expressed by morphological case or that morphological means of expression itself,” and adds that “it has been acknowl­edged for some time that the relations expressed by morphological case can be expressed in other ways, notably by adpositions and position.”5 These observations are important for English, where the morphological means of expressing cases are reduced to a minimum, and the relation a case expresses is signified by position. In the present discussion, the term case will be used in the relational sense, on the assumption that a relation is established by case between a noun phrase and another component of the sentence, two grammatical units whose lexical import is endlessly variable. We will be mainly concerned with the makeup of the head of the noun phrase. To explore the question of the “common” case calls for examining the relation established between the grammatical meanings of the two syntactic units involved. Is, for example, the relation between a direct object and its verb the same as that between an attributive noun phrase and its head?6 Only when the nature of these relations has been discerned can we hope to work back to the makeup of the case permitting them, and so to explore John Anderson’s claim that “the ‘cases’ are clearly grounded in semantic substance.”7 Our approach is based on the assumption that one can best reach an understanding of a syntactic relation by examining its two terms, and thus analyzing the grammatical makeup of the words involved in the related components. We will first consider the substantive, whether actualized as a syntactic unit on its own (a noun) or as head of a syntactic unit (a noun phrase).8 This includes its uses as a subject, as a predicative complement, as the direct or indirect object of a verb, as an attributive, and as an adverbial.9 It is hoped that this will throw some light on the use of a noun phrase as the object of a preposition, and on the nature of the preposition itself as a part of speech. Finally, two occasional uses of a substantive, as a vocative and as an appositive, will be considered from the point of view of case presented here. This

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brings us to the first question to be settled: the status of -’s, the socalled genitive in English. identifying case in english

For those who consider case to be the morphological means of expressing a substantive’s syntactic relations, as in Latin or Old English, the -’s ending is seen as the only case in Modern English. Objections to this view are raised by Quirk et al.10 on the basis of postmodified noun phrases such as the teacher of music’s room, where “the genitive ending is added to the end of the phrase, not to the end of the head noun.” They also point out that in an example such as my daughter’s (new) desk “the genitive … is not a single word, but a noun phrase in its own right … embedded as a definite determinative within another noun phrase.” They conclude that it is “necessary to revise the idea … that the genitive is a noun inflection”; it is “more appropriately described as a ‘postposed enclitic.’” As a consequence, “the common/genitive distinction in present-day English is not really a case distinction.” While this clarifies the syntactic position of -’s, it raises the question of how a noun phrase can take a clitic, as well as the question of what permits -’s to play the role of “a definite determinative,” providing, in John R. Taylor’s view, “unique identification of the referent of the possessee noun.”11 Adopting this view of -’s for the time being – we will return to it later – implies that the substantive in Modern English has no morphological means of expressing case. For some linguists this raises the question of whether there can be a grammatical category without some morphological means of its expression in discourse. Granted the history of English when the four canonical syntactic cases of the Old English substantive were reduced to a single morphological form,12 one may well question the existence of case today. On the other hand, granted the ability of the noun phrase to fulfil the diverse roles mentioned above, it seems clear that the substantive’s syntactic potential is still quite considerable. Moreover, as we shall see, assuming the existence of case as a category of the substantive expressed only by position in the sentence provides the means of clarifying descriptions such as “adjective and noun … functioning as attributive modifiers”13 or “adjectives used as principals,” descriptions that tend to reduce parts of speech to their syntactic roles. Our problem is how to discern case in the “closed watch” word of English,

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how to “form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible” for the diverse uses of the noun phrase observed, and describe this potential of the substantive. I am aware of only one attempt to confront this problem, that found in Guillaume’s teaching on the substantive in French. On the basis of his general theory of the word in Indo-European languages, he proposed that the substantive’s lexeme is configured by gender, number, person, and case. There being no inflectional means of expressing case in French, Guillaume proposed14 within the substantive a single case, a “synthesis” of the three functions – subject, object, attribute. It is only in the sentence that this synthetic case is “differentiated” to provide for one of its functions. Valin15 later generalized this approach, proposing case as a grammatical potential of the substantive permitting two functional cases in discourse: support case when the noun phrase is to function as subject providing a support for the predicate; and import case when the noun phrase is to bring (to import) its meaning to the verb or to some other support in the sentence, including a preposition. Granted that the -’s is no longer a morphological sign of the substantive in English, we are confronted with a situation similar to that in French. What is often called the “common” case of the substantive itself is manifested in the noun phrase either as a meaning import to be said about something else in the sentence, or as a meaning support about which a finite verb, a predicate, is said. As Valin points out,16 the same general relation of import-incident-to-support is basic to the system of the parts of speech as described in Essay 4. The important point for discussing case is that person is the substantive’s spatial category for representing a support within its lexeme’s range of representation. case in the noun phrase

Thus a substantive’s case potential is actualized as either support or import case, not within the word itself – hence no inflection for case – but only in the noun (phrase), which is to be put into relationship with another syntactic unit. When the substantive’s synthetic case is actualized as support case, it enables the noun phrase to function as the subject of a verb.17 That is, besides aspect, mood, and tense for configuring a lexeme temporally as an event, a verb’s grammatical system involves person to represent spatially in a generalized way

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the instigator (or, in the passive, some other necessary condition) of the event.18 Through its cardinal person, a finite verb makes its event, and with it the meaning import of the whole predicate, incident to its support in the noun phrase subject, with its ordinal person specifying what is being talked about. Thus the predicate’s import is incident to its subject, a noun phrase in support case generally signified by its position preceding the verb.19 Saying the predicate about the subject through syntactic incidence in this way gives rise to the spatiotemporal meaning of the sentence. Moreover, through its cardinal person (usually specified by a determiner), the subject’s support case provides the means of referring the sentence’s meaning to what it is said about, to something or someone outside language. Thus, even when the sentence is fully constructed, the import support relation comes into play through referential incidence: the meaning of the sentence is made incident to what it represents in the speaker’s intended message, its referent.20 A noun phrase in import case does not synthesize sentence meaning and make referential incidence possible in this way. Import case does, however, enable the noun phrase to establish a variety of syntactic relations with other sentence components, as indicated above. This variety reflects different manners of realizing the operation of incidence, of making a meaning import incident to a meaning ­support, as is perhaps best seen in a noun phrase used as a predicative complement, i.e. with the copula to predicate something of the ­subject, as in He’s an excellent pianist. Although it characterizes the subject and not the event, its position after the verb indicates that the noun phrase complement is incident to the verb. This suggests that the meaning import of the predicative noun phrase is first incident to the copula verb’s cardinal person, and then, as part of the predicate, is made incident to the subject.21 That is, import case orients the meaning of a predicative noun phrase to a support outside its own semantic range. Import case is also found in a noun phrase when it is the object of a verb. This function, which has also been described as adjectival in nature,22 is generally signified by its position following the verb, as opposed to that of a subject preceding the (full) verb. As Duffley points out: a verb can represent an event not only as dependent for its existence on an event-originator but also as impacting on …

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an ‘event-conditionee’, an entity which corresponds to a direct object. The fact that a direct object does not require a preposition to connect it to the verb is an indication that the eventconditionee is part of the internal semantic make-up of the verb itself: the role of the direct object is simply to specify the identity of this participant in the event. 23 That is, like the event-originator, this entity impinged on by the event is represented as integrated into the event, but, unlike the subject, it is, as an entity conditioned in some way by the event, made incident to the verb’s cardinal person. Through its import case, the direct object noun phrase, representing the nature of this participant in the event, is made incident to the space represented by this second intraverbal person. It requires no preposition because its support is already represented in the verb. This brings us to the use of a noun phrase as the indirect object of the verb. Whereas most of the personal pronouns reflect the support/import distinction of case underlying subject and object functions, they give no indication of a distinction between direct and indirect object functions. On the other hand, the positioning of noun phrases does give a clear indication of different functions. Both noun phrases in He gave each student a prize depict “eventconditionees,” as can be seen by the two passive versions: Each student was given …; A prize was given … – but their relation to the event is quite different. Furthermore, their relative position is significant: the indirect object must follow the verb and precede the direct object. Reversing their order, He gave a prize to each student, calls for a preposition, and the noun phrase is no longer considered an indirect object. When used as the object of a preposition, the noun phrase depends on the preposition to find its support, whereas positioning it before the direct object requires no preposition. This suggests that there is also a person-support provided in the verb for a noun phrase functioning as indirect object. Although the function of indirect object is infrequent, it does indicate the possibility of the cardinal person of certain verbs providing a support for a second conditionee of their event. Thus, import case makes a noun phrase available for both direct object and indirect object, as well as permitting predicative complement functions. Import case also enables a noun phrase to fulfil an adverbial function to express certain characteristics of a verb’s event.24 The noun

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phrase characterizes the verb’s event for time in The concert lasted two hours and in She is coming this afternoon; for space in He went that way and She walked three miles; for manner in They rode single file. That is, for these examples the noun phrase expresses the duration of lasts, the position in time of coming, the direction of went, the distance of walked, and a manner for rode. These are characteristics common to many events of similar lexical import, a fact indicating that the noun phrase specifies something already inherent in the verb’s event. This suggests that some trait in the verb’s import provides a support for the incidence of the noun phrase’s import. The fact that in each example the noun phrase qualifies the event for some characteristic indicates that its lexical import is incident to the event itself and not to the event’s spatial support, as seen above for the object of the verb. This incidence is effected before the verb’s lexical import effects its own incidence to the cardinal support person in the verb and thence to the subject. In short, in these uses the noun phrase is incident to the event, a support which is itself constituted as an import to another support, the person-subject, and so fulfils an adverbial function of external incidence of the second degree. Should the noun phrases in sentences such as She is only five years old and We’re running ten minutes late be considered another type of adverbial usage, incident to old and late? It remains of course to observe other such uses to see if import noun phrases in adverbial usage are found to express characteristics other than time, space, and manner as illustrated here. Far more common are prepositional phrases that are adverbial in function, such as She walked for three miles and They rode in single file. Here, the prepositional phrase is constituted through the incidence of the noun phrase to the preposition, which then effects the incidence to the event. This gives much the same resulting meaning as the sentence without the preposition.25 The role of a preposition is to specify by means of its own lexical import the nature of a relationship and to actualize the relationship by relating its noun phrase to what it is said about, i.e. by making the noun phrase incident to something else in the sentence.26 A prepositional phrase can of course fulfil diverse sentence functions, including even that of subject, as in Under the bed is dusty and After Christmas will do. Here the prepositional phrases relate respectively to a place in space and a moment in time, neither of which is explicitly represented as such (cf. The floor under the bed …; Sometime after Christmas …). Context

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and situation, however, make it sufficiently obvious what the speaker has in mind so that the prepositional phrase can point to a support for the predicate.27 In all uses with a preposition, the noun phrase exhibits import case. Another function of the noun phrase not calling for a preposition is apposition, as in Anna, my best friend, was here last night. Noun phrases in apposition are directly related to another noun phrase, but, as the phrase’s position suggests, the relation is not one of attribution (to be discussed below). Rather, the two noun phrases here are “coreferential” according to Quirk et al.: “they must normally be identical in reference.”28 This observation suggests that although lexically distinct they have a similar grammatical makeup, and indeed, if we reversed their order, my best friend would be subject of the above sentence. The following example will help bring out the difference between attributive and appositive functions: Next Saturday, financial expert Tom Timber will begin writing a weekly column on the national economy.29 Here, financial expert functions as an attributive import to its support in Tom Timber, the two noun phrases constituting a complex noun phrase that functions as subject. However, with an article, a financial expert, the phrase would function as subject and the proper noun phrase would have an appositive function, coreferring to the same individual, but not a subject function. This suggests that as an appositive noun phrase Tom Timber does not have the same case as the phrase it is in apposition to – and this could apply to my best friend in the first example – but rather imports its meaning to the spatial support already represented by the preceding noun phrase. This imposes on the reader/listener the need to establish with the noun phrase preceding it a specific meaning relation – that of identifying the two representations as the same individual.30 Apposition provides perhaps the clearest manifestation of grammatical case in the noun phrase, since its function, quite distinct from all others, and signified by its position after another noun phrase, is often brought out by commas or by intonation and pauses in speaking. In a vocative function, a noun phrase can either establish a speaking relationship, as in John! Dinner’s ready, or express “the speaker’s relationship or attitude to” the addressee, as in My back is aching, doctor.31 As such, the substantive is in the second person. It has no specific function in a sentence and in fact “can stand alone without any sense of ellipsis,”32 often constituting a sentence on its own, as

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in Waiter! or Ladies and gentlemen. However, in identifying the person addressed, a vocative does effect referential incidence, and in this resembles the subject of a sentence, which refers sentence meaning to its extra-linguistic counterpart in the speaker’s intended message. This, along with its not being incident to a support in the sentence, would seem to suggest that the noun phrase functioning as a vocative is in support case even though it does not function as subject providing support for a predicate – another use calling for a more detailed examination of usage.33 It remains to examine the use of import case that has occasioned the most discussion: attributive uses. Nouns used attributively resemble adjectives and yet do not fit in with the “traditional” view of parts of speech, “word classes”; and yet they are increasingly frequent. at t r i b u t i v e n o u n p h r a s e s : a c a s e f o r c a s e

In a recent discussion of constructions such as the bus station, a colleague disagreed with the view that bus is an adjective, as I once proposed.34 It could not be an adjective, he argued, because it cannot function as a predicative: *The station is bus. There are, as it turns out, “many attributive adjectives that are never predicative” according to Bolinger, who gives examples such as the main reason, a crack salesman but not *The reason is main, *The salesman is crack.35 Although my colleague’s argument is not sufficient, it does raise a question that hearkens back to a discussion in the 1880s, mentioned by Jespersen, concerning whether the first component in cannon ball, sea water, stone wall, and the like is an adjective or a substantive. Jespersen concludes that these are examples of substantives with “an approximation to, rather than the full attainment of, the adjectival status” – what he calls “substantival adjuncts.” He considers this syntactic use “one of the most characteristic traits of present-day English.”36 Many studies consider that the first component in such phrases is a noun, some assuming that “noun-noun” constructions constitute compounds. Attempts to analyze them on this basis tend to focus on the lexical relations between the two components, as in Hatcher, but this turns out to be difficult because of the variety of possible interpretations. For Coates, [s]uch constructions are therefore (potentially) multiply ambiguous. This ambiguity is presumably resolved by the

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speaker/hearer by means of the semantic relationship between the two items, and the information provided by context.37 Similarly, for Dierickx, ambiguity “often depends on the context (including the ‘situational’ context), and even on the reader.”38 Recognizing this, Ryder sees “a need for a much more flexible model for the compounding process, which takes into account the characteristics of a particular language user,” and mentions two advantages of the model proposed: First, because this model assumes that the grammar is made up of all conventional expressions and the schemas that can be abstracted from them, it has an exhaustive inventory of all compound patterns. Second, all established compounds are listed in the grammar, so their semantic interpretations are stated.39 Warren also recognizes that “[t]he main stumbling block seems to have been the fact that many compounds can be interpreted in more than one way … in particular when analysed out of context,” but considers it “essential for our interpretation of unestablished compounds that we perceive their semantic structure.” Although there is “no reason to analyse compounds in terms of grammatical categories” such as subject, object, predicate, etc., in sentences it is “essential that we perceive which one of the constituents is the referring element,” implying that referring does not depend on a grammatical component. And Taylor considers apple juice to be an example of “root compounds,” which “simply align two nouns, the first of which does not bear a direct, quasi-syntactic relation to the second.”40 In discussing “a compound like jar lid,” Langacker41 maintains that neither word is “limited to any particular grammatical environment … Both are largely autonomous.” Roey and Bauer, on the other hand, both question the assumption that all noun + noun combinations are compounds. The latter discusses various criteria for distinguishing between compounds and syntactic constructions, pointing out that “compounds all derive from syntactic constructions.” Since appealing to “degree of lexicalization” and “degree of syntactic availability” to distinguish the two does not lead to a satisfactory distinction, Bauer concludes that “the two should

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be treated as variants of a single construction (possibly morphological, possibly syntactic), at least until such time as a suitable coherent distinction can be properly motivated.”42 All this would seem to confirm Jespersen’s view43 that “the analysis of the possible sense-relations can never be exhaustive.” Moreover, it is hard to imagine that even an innovative, situation-specific use such as Take the apple-juice seat44 could become a “standard, or conventionalized expression”45 or even an “unestablished compound.” The fact that listeners can interpret the complex expression semantically and discern the referring element indicates that it exists as a syntactic whole, part of a sentence, in the mind of the speaker. Thus, although the use of a noun phrase as an attributive is “one of the most characteristic traits of present-day English” and has occasioned considerable comment, there is no clear distinction on syntactic or semantic grounds between this construction and compounds.46 To address this dilemma we will approach it from the point of view of the words involved in order to explain the constructions observed in the sentence. We will begin by examining how noun + noun units are constructed syntactically, leaving the question of compounds for later. s u b s ta n t i v e v s . a d j e c t i v e

To understand how the speaker establishes an attributive relation between the lexemes of two nouns, we must start with the grammatical element built into each substantive that enables one of them to function in discourse as an attributive noun, the other as a head noun. Having discussed the noun as head in previous essays, here we will concentrate on the noun as attributive and begin by comparing it with the attributive adjective. An interesting lead is provided in the 1880 discussion reported by Jespersen,47 who reproaches Murray with having been induced by the Latin aqua nivis to take snow in his twelfth-century snow water as a genitive. However, Murray speaks of snow as a “position-genitive” in his example. That is, “it was no adjective but the simple nouns salt, sea, snow, well, and dew, that stood in their simple uninflected forms in a genitive relation before another noun.” Murray’s view of such early examples suggests that the notional relation between the ideas snow, salt, sea, etc. and water, expressed by the position of the first noun, is similar to the relation expressed by the genitive inflection in the Latin declension. This is not to say that all such constructions

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express the same relationship, as we have seen. What this discussion does bring out is the fact that lexical relations between nouns, which were formerly expressed by inflections, have not all disappeared. Rather, today such relations are expressed by other means: in particular, by syntactic position. According to Michael, the discussion of how to distinguish between substantive and adjective in English began in English grammars during the seventeenth century. For earlier grammarians: When the difference between noun substantive and noun adjective was not described in grammatical terms … it was described in metaphysical ones: as an expression of the difference between substance and quality … The uneasy association of these two points of view is apparent throughout the whole development of English grammar.48 In Latin, with its declension shared by adjectives and substantives, there is an observable, morphological basis for discerning a superordinate noun category. But for grammarians in English, where there is no declension common to both adjective and substantive, “[t]he noun was always an unreal category.”49 This has led to neglecting the meaning consignified by a word and considering the parts of speech as word classes defined by their position in the sentence, a neglect that results in describing examples such as bus above as a noun used as an adjective, or small in Small is beautiful as an adjective used as a noun. Since attributive nouns have not yet been examined through the part of speech viewed as consignified by the substantive, it is hoped that this essay will get beyond describing what has been observed to provide an explanation. Granted the internal incidence of a substantive and the external incidence of an adjective, the attributive noun poses a quandary: its meaning import is said about something it does not name. Thus, although the meaning expressed by bus in the bus station and even its position would seem to indicate that it is an attributive adjective, consideration of a relatively recent development in this construction provides evidence to the contrary. Some scholars have pointed out that during the last century it has become more common to pluralize the component in adjective position, as in a systems analysis.50 An expression of plurality comes out clearly in the parks committee as opposed to the park committee. To be noted here is that, unlike

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an adjective in French, parks does not agree with the following substantive, committee. Rather, it expresses the plurality of its own lexeme, so that we understand ‘a committee dealing with several parks,’ as opposed to the phrase with park understood as ‘a committee dealing with one park.’ Other examples from Johansson: the Missing Persons Bureau, a war crimes trial, the unordered rules hypothesis.51 Thus in this construction each component expresses its own number. In the light of our analysis, the fact that the lexeme of the first component here can represent either a particular or generalized entity – system, park, person, etc. – or a number of entities – systems, parks, persons – indicates that it can characterize its own spatial support and so be configured as a substantive. In a use such as the park committee, park, besides a ‘one park’ sense, could also be interpreted ‘for park matters in general’ implying perhaps more than one park, a good example of ambiguity occasioned by actualizing park with an ‘unbounded’ spatial support. Similarly, bus in a bus station is understood as ‘for any bus,’ rather than ‘for a single bus.’ As Johansson’s study makes clear, the expressive effects of attributive nouns are multiple, corresponding to context and situation. This appears to settle the above problem of bus: it is a noun, not an adjective. On the other hand, it poses the more general problem: how can a noun characterize another word without the intervention of a preposition, as in the committee for the park(s)? How can a word with internal incidence, a substantive determining its own support, function like a word with external incidence? As seen above, the grammatical component of case is proposed for the substantive as offering two possible ways for a noun to function in discourse, support case and import case. Attributive nouns are in import case.52 noun

+

noun constructions

To play an attributive role, a noun on its own or as the head of a noun phrase is in import case, and in this it resembles a noun (phrase) called on to function as the object of a verb or a preposition: the noun with its lexical import incident to its own support is said about some other component of the sentence. Having the same grammatical case in all three functions does not of course entail the same relation between the lexical meanings involved. Between bus and station in the bus station, the semantic relation is not the same as that between take and the bus in take the bus, or that between by and

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bus in by bus. All result from implementing bus with import case in one or another of these three functions expressed by its position in the sentence. This diversity is not surprising when we recall that, historically, import case is a generalization of the former declension’s various oblique cases. As mentioned above, in the attributive function a noun can be either singular or plural, a fact indicating that it represents its own extensity as continuate (unbounded or bounded) or discontinuate. It seems obvious, at least for most such uses, that the adjective + substantive noun phrase has a single spatial referent in the speaker’s intended message; but we can hardly say the same thing of the park(s) committee or the bus station, where the park(s) and the committee do not, in our experience, occupy the same place, nor do the bus and the station (necessarily). Considering an attributive to be a noun (phrase) has been criticized, because the attributive cannot contain a determiner. This criticism brings out the fact that the attributive noun phrase does not refer to its own place in the intended message; its import case makes it incident to the support noun through which the complex noun phrase can be referred. If the attributive designates a space, as in the London subway, the backstairs carpet, the space attributed helps situate the place of the head of the complex noun phrase. Even in the levels idea53 the attributive noun levels indicates the nature of the head idea and so coincides with its mental space. The point here is that, unlike the adjective, the attributive noun determines its own extensity, its own spatial support, and this may or may not coincide with the place in space of the following noun, depending on the relation between the two notions the speaker wants to express. The distinction between adjective and substantive is not obvious with lexemes readily formed as either one. Out of context, the phrase a criminal investigation54 is ambiguous. Interpreted as an illegal investigation, criminal expresses a quality of the investigation and so is understood as an ordinary adjective. Interpreted as an investigation of a criminal or criminals, criminal indicates the object of the investigation, an individual or class of humans with its own spatial support, and so is understood as an attributive noun phrase. Bauer55 gives examples that raise a similar problem (with vocal stress marked): I went on a tour round the 'toy factory where they make Lego.

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Here toy, with its spatial support distinct from that of factory, is clearly an attributive substantive. But in: We played with the toy village: there was a toy church, a toy post office, even a toy 'factory where all the dolls worked.

toy finds its spatial support in factory, attributing a quality to it, and so is understood as an adjective.56 Attempting in this way to discern the respective grammatical makeups of an adjective and of a substantive as the prior condition of their respective functions helps explain Warren’s distinction57 between classifying and identifying attributives. In its classifying effect, an attributive helps “to delimit a class, subgroup or type” of what the head substantive designates, as in pocket knife and bilge water. In its identifying effect, the attributive indicates “which one or ones of a number of known referents we have in mind,” as in the bathroom door and the mice example. These expressive effects reflect two different extensities of the head noun rather than a function of the attributive, as shown by the identifying effect of a family name in the Burch house, a phrase that could have a classifying effect if the family are known as house builders, as in She has never visited a Burch house. The point here is that the attributive noun brings in its own extensity, and this helps to make explicit the extensity the speaker has in mind for the whole noun + noun construction: which kind of knife, which door, which (kind of) house. The role of the article – a, the, or ø – is of course crucial here, as shown by the classifying effect of sea air (‘in general’) as opposed to the identifying effect of the sea air (‘here’). In each use, the attributive nominal’s import case makes its lexeme incident to the head noun’s lexeme, a grammatical relationship of external incidence that appears to be a constant in constructing the complex noun + noun phrase. This invariable makes possible an unlimited variety of lexical expressive effects depending on the speaker’s/listener’s interpretation of the relation between the two lexemes in light of their respective extensities, as well as the context and situation. This approach may also throw light on the distinction between noun + noun constructions and compounds. Our assumption that, in every use, speakers form the lexeme of each substantive to represent something in their momentary intended message does not lead to considering the resulting construct a compound, understood as

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“a lexical unit consisting of more than one base … and functioning grammatically and semantically as a single word.”58 We have seen that the two components have different grammatical functions, and that our combining them is not a process of compounding, of “lexical word-formation,” of “forming a new base by combining two bases.”59 For the ordinary speaker, words such as jukebox, wheelbarrow, and even a proper name such as New England do arise from a single lexeme, a potential in tongue, the result of a historical combining of two lexemes making them a compound. Where, however, the original relation between two recognizable constituents is no longer part of a speaker’s awareness (e.g. nightmare), what was once a compound now constitutes a single lexeme for that speaker, where “the meaning of the whole cannot be logically deduced from the meaning of the elements separately.”60 This implies that a compound’s lexeme is part of a given speaker’s vocabulary like any other lexeme, but whether or not a given combination constitutes a compound may vary from one speaker to another. There are of course examples that are compounds for some speakers but not for others depending on individual usage and familiarity, but this sort of variation is only to be expected in lexical matters. The point is that bringing together two lexemes in our noun (phrase) noun (phrase) analysis of attributive constructions excludes classifying them as compounds whose original components are no longer separate lexemes brought together by the ordinary speaker. Worth emphasizing is the need to avoid the inherent difficulty in proposing the frequent explanation of a substantive “functioning as attributive modifier” for kid in kid power,61 or even “as an adverb” for miles in He’s miles better than his brother. Rather, it can be avoided by proposing that the transition from a substantive as a lexical-­ morphological unit to a noun as a syntactic entity entails actualizing the substantive’s case potential, so that it is the noun or noun phrase and not the substantive that is in import case here and carries out the syntactic function. This does not contradict the grammatical makeup of miles and kid 62 as substantives here, but it entails treating them, and any other substantive in usage, whether attributive modifier or subject or object, etc., as nouns, as syntactic units. To bring out the point that the speaker does establish syntactic links by making one component incident to another in constructing the sentence, it is worth emphasizing that minimal noun + noun constructions such as bus station can be made more complex. Out of

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context, the construction the city bus station can have two interpretations. Understanding it as ‘the station for city buses’ (not interurban buses) involves making the noun city an attributive to the noun bus, so that the two form a noun phrase with a single notion, citybus. This noun phrase is then made incident to the noun station to form the more complex notion citybusstation. Understood as ‘the city station for buses’ (not trains), the city bus station involves first making bus incident to station and then making city incident to busstation. Of course the listener picks up clues of stress, pauses, etc. from the context in order to follow the same syntactic itinerary as the speaker and reach the intended sentence meaning. This is obvious in unambiguous uses where the first noun provides support for an adjective, as in a middle income family, a high protein diet, a multi-million dollar airport, where middle income, high protein, and multi-million dollar are noun phrases in import case finding their support in family, diet, and airport to constitute more complex noun phrases in either import or support case, depending on the function foreseen for them in the sentence. More complex uses and examples such as the following63 suggest that the written language can be even more complicated in this respect: the modern hospital, surgical and disposable health care products field the b b c Television Computer Projects Team List

Here, particularly out of context, the reader may well have trouble nesting the successive noun phrases up to the head, as in a Russian doll.64 These examples bring out that the speaker/writer and the listener/reader compose the phrase as a meaningful syntactic unit, which can hardly be considered a compound. possessive

-’ s

again

It is worth reconsidering the so-called possessive in the light of the foregoing discussion of various functions of a substantive as noun and head of noun phrase. As we have seen, the -’s has been called a “postposed enclitic” on a noun phrase “embedded as a definite determinative within another noun phrase” in examples such as my daughter’s desk. The very fact of finding the only remaining trace of the substantive’s declension for case in Old English suffixed to a noun phrase is strong evidence supporting our postulate that, in

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Modern English, case is a potential of the substantive one of whose possibilities is actualized in and exercised through the noun phrase. Historical studies have brought out that “[t]he ‘group genitive’ occurring in expressions such as the king of England’s daughter is first found in English texts of the late fourteenth century … The evidence suggests that the group genitive developed when the old inflectional genitive in -(e)s was generalised to all noun classes and became reanalysed as a clitic.”65 Moreover, this coincided with “fading agreement” within the noun phrase.66 With this new development, “a genitive inflection could come to be attached to a group of noun phrases as in The Wife of Bath’s Tale, where, before, only a single noun phrase could be inflected[:] The Wyves Tale of Bathe, CT III.1264/5.”67 The significance of this historical development, along with changes of word order and determiner usage in Middle English as outlined by Fischer, is that the noun phrase as we know it was emerging as a syntactic unit. That is, with the loss of the Old English declension and the disappearance of agreement, position became the means of expressing syntactic relations between words within the noun phrase, and between syntactic units (especially between noun phrase and verb) in the sentence. This major change in expressing grammatical relations has not been recognized by those who accept only morphemes as signs of case. I have argued that in Modern English the word exercises its function as a part of speech through external (adverb, adjective) or internal (substantive) incidence to form the noun phrase, a syntactic group whose lexical import is unified on the base of the noun’s support person. It is the noun phrase that exercises its syntactic function through either import or support case to form the sentence. Thus if the role a possessor noun phrase plays is that of a determiner that “profiles … a schematic possessee,”68 this involves an import function because the -’s relates the lexical import of its own phrase to the spatial support of another noun phrase, so that the possessor phrase is embedded in the possessee phrase. As a consequence, “the possessive morpheme refers to the same entity as the possessee nominal.”69 That is, in the above example, my daughter’s identifies (talks about) what is possessed by linking the space occupied by daughter to the space desk occupies. One study brings out “the significance of the right edge,”70 suggesting this getting beyond the limits of the first phrase. It seems clear that the -’s expresses

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incidence outside the spatial support of the possessor phrase, relating its import to the spatial support of the possessee phrase, and not (like attributives) to its lexeme, identifying or classifying it. Does this make the -’s one of the possible actualizations of the substantive’s case category? For the time being, it is perhaps better to call it a “clitic,” a term denoting what we observe but posing the question of what is involved in grammatically suffixing a noun phrase.71 For one scholar, “the correct analysis of the English possessive indicates something much more general about a range of grammatical categories.”72 For others, “both head and phrasal genitives involve case inflection … the phrasal genitive can apply to words of most classes.”73 It is even claimed that -’s “counts as a clitic, a separate syntactic word … realized by a mere suffix.”74 The question calls for further reflection on the operations involved in forming a noun phrase and on the notion of ‘possession,’ which is “far too narrow.”75 conclusion

As in any other attempt to account for observed data, it is important to have the big picture, the whole of the phenomenon in mind. Where the act of speech is involved, both speaker and listener must be taken into account, the former’s role as instigator of the act taking priority over the latter’s role as observer and interpreter of the resulting sentence. And since we speak in words and (usually) sentences, an analysis of how words, phrases, and sentences are put together is a prerequisite for explaining how they are understood. Guillaume’s theory of internal incidence for the substantive and external incidence for the adjective has provided the means for distinguishing between “adjective and noun … functioning as attributive modifiers.”76 Furthermore, his insight that, where there is no declension, case is a potential in the substantive to be actualized as import or support by the noun (or the noun phrase) has permitted us to explore the syntactic relation between the attributive role of the first noun and the support role of the noun it is incident to. So far no study has provided a fully satisfactory classification of the lexical relations between attributive phrase and head phrase. This is quite understandable in light of the analysis of the substantive given above. Granted that both substantives bring in their own lexemes, each of which may express different lexical senses in different uses, and granted that each substantive’s internal spatial

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support may vary in extensity from one use to another, the number of variables for each expressive effect to be explained is considerable. Complicating the issue is the fact that no two lexemes have exactly the same potential for senses expressed, and particularly the fact that many lexemes in English, such as kid, small, criminal, and toy, can be formed grammatically as either an adjective or a substantive. All this presupposes that the speaker is quite aware of situation and context and takes them into account when constructing a sentence. The result can be quite unpredictable combinations, such as Downing’s Take the apple-juice seat. The amazing thing is that normal speakers (non-linguists) can coin expressions like this just for the immediate occasion and listeners understand them quite readily in the give and take of everyday conversation. It is for the linguist to pause over this, “one of the most characteristic traits of present-day English,” to wonder at such creativity and the extraordinary instrument making it possible, our mother tongue. Our reducing a noun’s syntactic functions to two cases, support and import, appears to correspond to the historical development of English, judging by the morphological development of personal pronouns (I/me, we/us, etc.). The morphological generalization since Old English involved in this development, pushed to the limit by you and it as well as by the substantive, has not of course reduced the functional possibilities of the noun phrase. The proposal that these possibilities manifest case as a latent grammatical category in the substantive calls for much further exploration before it can be accepted, or rejected, as a valid contribution to our understanding of the substantive’s grammatical formation and the noun’s syntax in Modern English. On the other hand, even if the existence of case is recognized as a category in the substantive to be actualized in the noun phrase, it still remains to describe the binary system of case as a potential and to clarify what the difference between support and import cases involves in the makeup of the noun phrase. That a noun phrase in the support case should reflect the substantive’s own internal incidence is not surprising, but that in the import case it should reflect the external incidence of adjective, adverb, and verb, and even include prepositions, calls for further reflection.

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7 Person in the Substantive and the Verb

introduction

The ordinary speaker’s Self determines the hic et nunc of everything she/he says: the here, ultimate reference for situating anything in space, and the now, ultimate reference for situating anything in time. The speaker’s place in space excludes that of the person(s) addressed and everything else in the universe, whereas the speaker’s place in time can include (at least in imagination) the addressee(s) and everything else in the universe. As speakers, we have a certain freedom to move to another place in space because we experience space as static, whereas we have no freedom to change our place in time because we experience the present as constantly on the move, moving us with it. These parameters appear to be common to speakers of English in our ordinary, day-to-day stream of experience, i.e. excluding hallucinations, dreams, mystical states, and the like. It is this common experience that provides the background, the raw material, for acquiring, both individually and historically, the language potential we call our mother tongue. Individuals become speakers by hearing and interiorizing how those around them represent and express their common experience. Speakers constituting a language community constantly seek ways of better representing and expressing their ongoing, ever-changing experience, thus contributing to the development of their mother tongue. In languages with a part-of-speech system for constructing words, this space-time matrix of our usual state of consciousness is reflected by the substantive and the verb. Long considered a time word because of its conjugation, and particularly its tense – in German

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grammar one of the established terms for this part of speech is Zeitwort, literally “time word” – the verb is opposed to the substantive, more recently characterized as a space word because of its declension, and particularly its grammatical number.1 That is, the grammatical categories and auxiliaries of a verb represent and express an event as contained in, and containing, time, whereas the grammatical categories and determiners of a substantive (or pronoun) represent and express something or someone as contained in, and containing, space. Granted this difference between substantive and verb in the way they are grammatically formed, a difference giving rise to their different functions in a sentence, it is noteworthy that the two parts of speech have one grammatical category in common: that of person. For anyone curious about the systemic opposition involved between the two, this fact raises a question: does person play the same role in both substantive and verb? This is the question to be explored here. Like the questions already examined, our discussion is founded on the assumption that, to use a word in a sentence, it must be constructed by the speaker during the act of speech. This assumption presupposes that our mother tongue consists, not of ready-made words, but of all the elements and operations required to construct a word whenever the need for it arises.2 That is, each word is a momentary construct resulting from the categorizing processes of a given part of speech fashioning its lexeme in such a way as to fit into the place foreseen for it in the sentence the speaker is assembling. Guillaume’s view of the word is particularly important for a language such as English where many lexemes – empty, forward, round, for example – are readily formed as different parts of speech with little to indicate to the addressee how the speaker formed them except their position in the sentence. Because the morphological expression of grammatical categories is minimized in English, any observation (such as that of person) indicating a relation between parts of speech is of interest for the light it may throw on the system of the configuring operations making up each of the parts of speech involved. As discussed in Essay 3, Guillaume called cardinal person the grammatical formative underlying all three ordinal persons, the essential representation of space that takes on one or another of the ordinal roles, like a mask. In English, this binary composition of person, cardinal and ordinal, is most readily observed in the personal pronouns. Although other pronouns rarely (if ever) represent a position within the speaking relationship,3 they do represent a

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position beyond it and so are generally described as being in the third person. The same holds true for substantives, but since person has no visible morphology there, grammars do little more than recognize its presence as a category of the substantive. Person is also recognized as a category of the verb, mainly to characterize the -s ending of the indicative, but as in the case of the substantive, no attempt is made to discern the role of person in the verb. Thus, apart from the personal pronouns, there is little or no discussion of person concerning either what it represents or what it contributes to substantives, verbs, or other pronouns. This lack of discussion, no doubt due to the low profile of person, leaves an important question unanswered: how is it that these three parts of speech can indicate, each in its own way, what is being talked about, whereas parts of speech such as adverbs and prepositions, to which grammatical person has never been attributed, do not? In short, what in the makeup of this grammatical formative that we call person enables speakers to represent what they have in mind to talk about and enables addressees to refer to it? Comparing what we have seen for the substantive with what is found in the verb, and with what we shall see in Essay 8, will throw some light on the question. person in the verb

Although it is common to consider the -s form of the verb to be third person singular of the present tense, thus implying that ordinal person is part of a verb’s makeup in English, grammars do not attribute person to other verb forms except perhaps by agreement with their subjects. To be of course differs from all other verbs in this respect, with am, is, and are expressing distinctions of person; but even here the expression of ordinal person is so limited that the verb requires a subject, unlike verbs in languages such as Latin or Spanish, whose full-fledged morphological expression of person allows the pronoun subject to often be omitted. This would suggest that in English the various forms of to be are historical relics expressing no grammatical meaning distinguishing them from other verbs (something like sing and sang expressing the same distinction of tense as -ø and -ed). Thus outside of the -s form there is nothing to indicate that ordinal person is part of a finite verb’s grammatical makeup. Moreover, even considering that the -s form represents ‘third person singular’ is problematic. It is not found with verbs in the past tense, nor with verbs in the subjunctive mood, nor with can and the

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other modal auxiliaries in the non-past tense of the indicative even when used with a third-person subject. These constraints indicate that the -s ending represents more than just ‘third person singular,’ but exactly what it means has yet to be discerned.4 In any case, the evidence it provides is hardly sufficient for affirming that all finite verbs are conjugated for ordinal person, first, second, and third, as in certain other languages. It would be more in line with its lack of endings to suggest that the English verb has completed its historical development of leaving the representation and expression of ordinal person to its subject. Speaking about ordinal person, Guillaume observed that “the tendency in English is visibly to transfer the expression of person outside the verb.”5 Assuming this to be the case, it would mean that finite verbs have come, in this respect, to resemble non-finite verbs, which are certainly not conjugated for ordinal person since they cannot be made incident to a subject. Another resemblance between finite and non-finite verbs is reflected by the semiology of most verbs: the -ed inflection serves to express both a participle and the past tense of the indicative, and the uninflected form to express the infinitive, the (present) subjunctive, and the non-past tense of the indicative. It should not, however, be concluded that the English verb has eliminated all representation of person from its grammatical makeup. Whereas a substantive’s lexeme represents the nature of something perceived as an entity, something with an extension in space, a lexeme formed as a verb represents the nature of something perceived as a happening, something with a duration, an extension in time. Just as the space occupied by an entity can be represented in two ways, unbounded or bounded, so the time required for a happening to take place, its duration, can be represented in two ways: as an activity developing from instant to instant or as a state persisting unchanged throughout its duration. We have seen that in a substantive it is cardinal person that represents the extent of space occupied by an entity and situates it in space through ordinal person either inside the speaking relationship or outside it, often with a determiner. In a verb, aspect represents the event’s duration and tense situates it, often through an auxiliary, in time as represented by mood. In the indicative mood, tense situates the event either within the time sphere of the speech act or prior to it, i.e. either in the non-past or in the past; in the (present) subjunctive mood, tense situates the event subsequent to either the act of speech (Heaven

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help him) or the main verb (I suggested he leave early); in the quasinominal mood, tense (infinitive and participles as part of a verb phrase) situates the event arriving at, occurring during, or being over at any moment in time. This parallel between the substantive with person representing its spatial support and the verb with tense representing its temporal support is noteworthy, but it is not the whole story. We have seen that a substantive forms a lexeme to give it internal incidence: it can be said only of an entity within its own range of representation. Similarly, a finite verb forms a lexeme to be said about a happening within its own range of representation. However, whereas a substantive designates a person or thing existing in its own space to the exclusion of everything else, a verb designates an activity or state to take place, or taking place, or having taken place somewhere in time along with anything else existing at that moment. With regard to its lexical import, then, a verb also has internal incidence, and yet it is categorized as a part of speech with external incidence because, it seems, any happening is perceived as dependent on some spatial entity to ensure its existence. Why this difference between perceiving an entity and perceiving a happening? Is it because we experience space as a stationary universe in which we are free to move, to occupy our own place in space to the exclusion of everything and everyone else, but experience time as a universe in motion where we and everything else existing in the present moment are carried along with it? Be that as it may, whatever difference there may be between our manner of experiencing space and time, the very fact of perceiving something as a happening, as temporal, entails that it has a spatial setting. That is, the verb is a part of speech whose lexeme represents a happening which is grammatically formed by aspect, mood, and tense as an event requiring a spatial support. This support, which is outside the event, not part of the lexeme’s extension, is represented within the English verb by cardinal person as a generalized, unspecified space. This makes the finite verb a word that, unlike a substantive, cannot “stand on its own” in a sentence but must be made incident to (said about) something else in the sentence: its subject, expressed or implied by context or situation. In Guillaume’s terms: an exo-semantic person, outside the particular lexeme. This is the case of the verb. The person the verb relates to is a person

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taken outside the lexeme and remains, with regard to the verb, something foreign to its meaning but on which it depends.6 The verb thus brings its event with its unspecified external support to the sentence, ready to establish syntactic contact with another part of the sentence – in the case of a finite verb, usually a noun phrase specifying the entity providing the event’s support in space. Thus a finite verb’s lexeme is configured by tense, which gives it a support in time and incorporates cardinal person to provide it with the potential for a spatial support. To give its cardinal person an ordinal person that situates the event’s support in space, the verb must be made incident to (predicated of) a subject.7 Like the adjective, the verb is incident to an external spatial support, but unlike the adjective, the verb reciprocates by situating its subject at the place in time represented by its tense. This verb subject verb relationship makes a sentence the expression of a space-time matrix reflecting the parameters of our ordinary experience. It is this two-way relationship between substantive and verb that enables an addressee to refer the resulting meaning – the “complete thought” expressed by the sentence – to the experiential, spatiotemporal level, i.e. to the extra-linguistic message the speaker has in mind. What role does person play in all this? This intricate interplay of person in a verb with no overt manifestation in English may appear unfounded speculation, particularly if, as argued above, the verb is not conjugated for ordinal person. What justifies the stance that person is present at all? Several factors suggest that there is a spatial component in the verb. The system of voice, common to all verbs, depicts different realizations of a conditioning relation between the event and its spatial support: the subject is depicted as “an event-originator” in the active voice but as an “event-conditionee” in the passive, to borrow Duffley’s terms, a relation between event and spatial support expressed even in non-finite verbs, which take no subject.8 Likewise for aspect, which determines a temporal relation between the event’s immanence and transcendence by representing its spatial support within or beyond (a portion of) the event’s duration.9 Furthermore, if, when made incident to the subject, the finite verb somehow “agrees with” it – that is to say, integrates its ordinal person – this implies that it brings in a representation of cardinal person that can be actualized as first, second, or third. That is why a subject is required in English: a finite verb’s

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lexeme cannot be predicated of a subject without the actualization of ordinal person. This is borne out by imperatives such as Scram! and Beware of the dog, which give no indication of ordinal person, and yet from situation and context listeners and readers understand cardinal person to be actualized as second person and so to refer to themselves as addressees. The point is that any such actualization of a position within (first and second persons) or beyond (third person) the speaking relationship also presupposes the presence in the verb of cardinal person common to all three. How about non-finite verbs? When used to form part of a finite verb compound, infinitives and participles are made incident to an auxiliary. That is, the lexical verb’s event, incident to the auxiliary, is situated with regard to the stretch of time represented by the auxiliary. Through the auxiliary the event is made incident to the subject, giving the verb an ordinal person. The fact that the event in examples such as He can leave tomorrow, I’ve seen the film, and the like is attributed to a subject within or beyond the speaking relationship indicates that infinitives and participles bring to the compound verb cardinal person ready to be actualized through the auxiliary by the subject’s ordinal person. Even in an informal use without auxiliary, such as See you later, granted participants’ awareness of context and situation, both subject and auxiliary are understood (I’ll). That is, the fact that the infinitive’s spatial support is actualized as the speaker indicates the presence of cardinal person, the necessary condition for bringing to mind first person. In uses where an infinitive or participle is not part of a finite verb, it is not made incident to a subject and so is not predicated of a particular ordinal person. The spatial support may be otherwise specified in the sentence by a pronoun as in They wanted me to steal it, or left unspecified as in It is wrong to steal, implying ‘for anybody,’ all possible spatial supports for steal whether within or outside the speaking relationship. This range of possibilities – from a single person to anybody – is a clear manifestation in discourse of how cardinal person in the infinitive provides a potential support, diversely actualizable as indicated through diverse syntactic or pragmatic means, to represent the event’s spatial support. It remains of course that the very nature of the event represented by a lexeme such as steal entails a certain limitation of possible supports for the event. This is comparable to the range of extensities cardinal person can represent for the lexeme of a substantive. The point here is that, along with the

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representation of an event and its event time, the infinitive’s lexical import brings with it cardinal person actualizable by ordinal person as a spatial support for the event’s accomplishment.10 So far, then, I have argued that ordinal person is no longer represented within the English verb, but that cardinal person is, even though there is nothing in the visible morphology of the verb to support this claim. I have argued that cardinal person must be present if the verb can be incident to a subject, “agreeing with” it in ordinal person, an agreement making the actualization of the verb’s event dependent on that spatial entity situated with regard to the speaking relationship. I have argued the same thing for the infinitive, even when, without an auxiliary, it is not made incident to a subject,11 because we do understand the event to have a spatial support, albeit non-actualized for ordinal person. How about the participles? Outside of its use as part of a verb in the progressive (They are entertaining the prime minister),12 where it is incident through the auxiliary to they, the -ing form can be used as an adjective (Her parents are very entertaining) where the copula links the lexeme expressing a quality, not an event, to the subject. I have argued in a preceding essay that an adjective must, unlike an adverb, embody a component that constrains it to find a spatial support. If, as proposed there, that component is an incipient representation of a spatial support to be completed by incidence to its substantive, it would enable the adjective to incorporate (agree with) the gender and number of its support, as seen in languages other than Modern English. Thus the verb vs. adjective ambiguity of They are entertaining would appear to arise from actualizing the lexeme entertaining either as an event or as a quality. As an event, entertaining seeks its temporal support through incidence to the tense of the are auxiliary; as a quality, it seeks a spatial support through the person of the are copula incident to the subject. In the gerundial form, as in Entertaining is often tiring, the lexeme is actualized in the event sense and so can take an object (Entertaining guests is tiring). The -ing form’s cardinal person may extend here to people in general, but is often restricted to whomever the speaker has in mind (… tiring for us), though this may be merely implied by the context or situation. Thus the -ing form appears to embody cardinal person to represent its spatial support in all its uses: when part of a verb in the progressive, actualizing it through the auxiliary in the ordinal person of the subject; when used as an adjective, actualizing it in its substantive; when used as a gerund, actualizing its own support.13

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The -ed participle is found in both verbal and adjectival uses. Like the other two non-finite forms, as part of a compound verb it is incident to an auxiliary which relays it to the subject either directly or indirectly through another auxiliary. That is, the participle’s cardinal person finds its ordinal person through external incidence to the person of the subject. Similarly, as an adjective it finds an external support in the person, cardinal + ordinal, of a substantive. s u m m a ry

These reflections are based on the commonplace that in a sentence words import a meaning to be said about something, about a support – the substantive, about an entity within its lexeme’s range of representation (extension); the verb, about a happening within its lexeme’s range of representation and (for finite verbs) about its subject, a support outside its lexeme’s range of representation. It is proposed that the support is represented spatially by a grammatical component, generalized (cardinal) person, which is specified by ordinal person in the substantive. In the verb, it is proposed that an event must have both a support in time represented by tense and, since in our common experience all happenings are perceived as dependent on some spatial entity for their existence,14 a support in space represented by person. However, since the English verb is no longer conjugated for ordinal person, it must have a generalized spatial support – what the three ordinal persons have in common – making it incident to and “agreeing” with a subject in ordinal person. Thus, because a substantive identifies the spatial support of the entity its lexeme represents, it has internal incidence, but because a finite verb in English cannot identify the spatial support of the event its lexeme represents, it has external incidence to a subject. As for the adjective, the verb’s external incidence is manifested by its position in the sentence. It remains to be seen if adopting the point of view of cardinal person in both space words and time words will throw any new light on such questions as transitivity and control,15 and the numerous other problems of syntax involved in constructing a sentence.

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8 The Personal Pronouns in English and the Representation of Ordinal Person The persistence of a 3rd person implicit beneath the explicit persons of higher rank (1st and 2nd) proceeds from the unbreakable link between the small Man/Man confrontation and the great Universe/Man confrontation it emerges from, but never separates from. Gustave Guillaume1

introduction

In a preceding essay on person (Essay 3), the relation between cardinal and ordinal persons was established on the basis of Guillaume’s reflections. This led to exploring how, through different actualizations in the predicative parts of speech (substantive, adjective, adverb, verb), cardinal person gives rise to different capacities of effecting syntactic incidence. It also led to examining how cardinal person enables the noun phrase to effect referential incidence to the intended message, thereby situating the thing being talked about within the speaker’s mental universe of space. In this way, it was possible to get some understanding of why Guillaume insists that cardinal person is a fact of general grammar. In that essay, however, the examination of ordinal person was not undertaken, mainly because it appears to be systematized differently in each language. Guillaume often speaks of ordinal person as manifested in French through the personal pronouns and the verb. His manner of approaching the question and his more general comments provide an invaluable starting point, but since the systems of pronoun and verb are quite different in English, his analyses of particular problems arising in French are of little help in exploring things in English.

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The present essay, then, will be based on the same general concept of cardinal person and its relation with ordinal person as put forward in that essay.2 From that point of view we will try to examine the data in English. Since the English verb provides insufficient evidence of being conjugated for person,3 we will focus on the personal pronouns to explore the system of ordinal person, taking advantage of whatever light Guillaume’s method of analysis and other general comments may throw on the question. the personal pronouns

It is customary in grammars to group I, me; you; he, him; she, her; it; we, us; they, them as a specific set of pronouns, the personal pronouns. On the basis of what each pronoun tells about its designatum, this grouping is usually subdivided into three ranks as follows: the one(s) speaking (I, me, we, us), named first person pronouns; the one(s) spoken to (you), second person; and the one(s) spoken about (he, him, she, her, it, they, them), third person. However, since all of the pronouns speak about something or someone, this cannot be the feature distinguishing third person from the others. What does distinguish it is that it refers to a designatum outside the speaking relationship, “what is neither speaker nor spoken to,” one not “directly involved in the discourse situation.”4 Within the set there are oppositions other than that of ordinal rank. The most obvious is I vs. me, he vs. him, she vs. her, we vs. us, they vs. them. This opposition between syntactic functions represented in tongue (along with who vs. whom) is a survival of the Old English declension. It is not found with you or it, a fact reflecting what appears in substantives to be the “common” or “synthetic” case, a potential permitting support and import functions of the noun phrase in the sentence and made explicit mainly by position.5 There is also the opposition of gender: he, him vs. she, her vs. it. This representation of gender in tongue, where animate with its two subgenders, masculine and feminine, is opposed to inanimate, appears to reflect a system similar to that for representing a lexeme’s gender in the substantive.6 Because they make gender explicit, however, these pronouns lend themselves to uses of greater diversity and subtlety than anything found in the substantive.7 Finally, grammarians recognize a singular/plural opposition between first-person pronouns – I, me vs. we, us – and also between

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third-person pronouns – he, him, she, her, it vs. they, them – but not second-person you, which can be either singular or plural in usage. None of the pronouns manifest the number opposition by -ø/-s, as in the substantive. The reflexive pronouns (myself, etc.) are often associated with the personal pronouns, since they too characterize their designata by different ordinal ranks. It is hoped that whatever findings result from our exploring the system of the personal pronouns here will throw light on the system of the reflexives. On the other hand, the possessive pronouns (mine, etc.), also associated with the personal pronouns, always characterize their designata as third person, like all other pronouns. That is, their representation of ordinal rank plays a different role here, which, once clarified, will throw light on the role of ordinal person in the personal and reflexive pronouns. the problem

Unless all those who group these twelve words are mistaken, the very fact of the personal pronouns being grouped as distinct from other pronouns implies that there is a specific set of relations linking them. Since speakers normally have no trouble coming up with the appropriate pronoun, we can assume that these relations are coherent and for the most part common to all speakers of English. That is, we are justified in assuming that these pronouns constitute a system consisting of a set of coherent relations, not between their different physical manifestations, their signs, but between their different mental significates, their meanings. Since meaning can exist only in the mind, this amounts to postulating for these pronouns a mental system that speakers can call on whenever a sentence they are constructing demands a personal pronoun. This mental system, of which we have no awareness, thus appears to be a necessary precondition to explain a speaker’s permanent capability of bringing into consciousness the particular pronoun, its meaning with its sign, required by the projected sentence. It follows that the task confronting a grammarian-linguist is to describe this preconscious mental system, which can never emerge, as such, into consciousness. The only way of carrying out this task is to examine the observable facts of usage and try to infer what prior conditions must have produced those data. Specifically, this involves comparing various uses of each pronoun in order to observe the different senses a given

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pronoun can express, in an effort to infer its underlying meaning in the system, its meaning potential. It is hoped that comparing the meaning potentials of different pronouns will, barring incomplete data, errors of interpretation, etc., throw enough light on their relations to make it possible to describe the system. Fortunately, grammarians have described various uses of each pronoun, providing a quantity of generally accepted data. They have, as we have seen, classified the observed facts in diverse ways, often giving a table distinguishing the pronouns on the basis of ordinal person, or function, or gender, or number. To my knowl­ edge, however, no attempt has yet been made to get beyond describing and classifying these observations in order to discern the underlying system grouping these twelve words into a coherent whole in the mind in such a way as to make the means of actualizing the appropriate pronoun permanently available to a speaker. That is, what we are looking for is not just a set of oppositions in the mind, but a set of positions within an operational system, positions of potential meanings with something in common but opposable to one another. For example, I involves an opposition to me, different from its opposition to you, or to we, etc., all of which oppositions are implied when actualizing I for use in discourse. It remains that all twelve words have something in common, making them personal pronouns and distinguishing them from other sets of pronouns. The challenge then is to reconstruct, in the manner of historicalcomparative linguistics, what cannot be observed, and to describe it in such a way as to indicate the systemic conditions capable of producing the appropriate pronoun with the required sense during the moment of speech. Since we produce them on the spur of the moment with the same facility as we do any other grammatical form, this must be an operational system, one which, when triggered during an act of language, projects into consciousness the appropriate pronoun, the one representing the position required for its intended role in the sentence. On the other hand, judging by the number of pronouns involved, this is one of the most complicated of grammatical systems. In view of this, it is not surprising that Guillaume, to my knowl­edge the only linguist to seek the operational system underlying a set of personal pronouns, did not succeed in spite of repeated efforts. In his work on the pronouns in French, however, he made a number of observations that may prove helpful here. Moreover, his more

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general reflections on person as a category offer guidelines suggesting how to approach the system in English, which differs in many respects from that of French. It remains that there is no guarantee of success for the venture undertaken here. At best we can hope to throw some light on the system, or at least, if we go astray, to make it obvious to others intrigued by the problem how to rectify and discern more clearly what is surely one of the most remarkable constructs developed and handed on to us by our linguistic forebears. pronouns

To situate our problem in a wider context, it should be seen as exploring only one of the subsystems of the pronoun. A word about the general category of pronoun is therefore in order. According to Michael, many grammarians in the Middle Ages agreed on what a pronoun does: “The pronoun signifies substance without quality, that is, it signifies a thing in itself.” Although in the eighteenth century the basically similar idea that pronouns “refer to things without naming them” was mentioned by James Harris, for the most part there is little agreement among grammarians about what a pronoun is, according to Michael: “Within the tradition, as later in the English grammars [up to 1800], the category pronoun is held together virtually by its name.”8 There appears to be no consensus in contemporary grammars either. For example, Wales points out that those who accept the traditional definition that personal pronouns “stand for a noun” generally fail to specify “the conditions for substitution.” Quirk et al. consider pronouns, along with words like such, so, and “pro-verb” do, as “pro-forms.” Huddleston and Pullum “regard pronouns as a subclass of nouns, not a distinct primary category.”9 In the present study, I adopt Guillaume’s view that the pronoun is a part of speech, opposable because of its makeup to the other parts of speech, including the substantive. Very early in his teaching, he depicts the pronoun as follows: “Of all the parts of speech, it is the hardest to define, to situate exactly in the grammatical system of any language.”10 He does go on to characterize it, in terms not of its “profound nature,” but of what it does: “What characterizes the pronoun is that it designates the object in ways that are not those of representation but of reference. A pronoun does not represent [lexically]; it refers: it marks in a mental space, in a referential field, a position, an extensity, and thereby, indirectly, it designates. The

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referential field within which the pronoun operates varies.” He appears to be making more explicit, albeit in quite different terms, the medieval grammarians’ “substance without quality” and Harris’s “referring without naming” by claiming that the “substance,” the “permanent substratum of things” (cf. o e d , s.v. “substance,” 3), is space, a space in the scenario the speaker has in mind. In the terms I have used elsewhere (see my 2009 study on the noun phrase), a pronoun does not represent what is being talked about by means of a lexeme; it represents what is being talked about only by the extent of space it occupies and its position in the speaker’s intended message (the referential field of the sentence). That is, a pronoun designates its referent by its position in space – thereby signifying “a thing in itself,” i.e. a spatial entity – and not by the particular nature of that thing. Some ten years later, Guillaume identifies the grammatical means enabling the pronoun to represent things in this way: “The category of the pronoun as a whole is a grasping of the totality of the thinkable by means (sous le rapport) of person.”11 Thus, like the substantive, the pronoun can effect referential incidence in usage, designate what is being talked about in the intended message, because it makes “explicit the mental path that the hearer must follow in order to identify the target,”12 to borrow John Taylor’s vivid way of describing the referential capacity of the -’s possessive suffix. What permits a pronoun to do this is, as in the substantive, cardinal person, which represents the extent of space occupied by the pronoun’s designatum, its referent. It remains, however, that the pronoun is a non-predicative part of speech bringing an abstract meaning to the sentence, and so not a subclass of the substantive, which is a predicative part of speech. That is, while a substantive’s lexeme characterizes the nature of what it talks about, its designatum, a pronoun has no such particularizing lexical import, but rather has an abstract formal meaning comprising certain spatial coordinates for locating its designatum in the referential field, the speaker’s intended message. In our attempt to explain what permits a pronoun to refer to its designatum, we are thus led to postulate two components. Since all pronouns have the capacity to refer by representing the extent of space occupied by their designata, they must all include cardinal person as part of their makeup, as a component of their meaning import. What differentiates any set of pronouns from the others is its manner of exercising reference, of indicating “the mental path the

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hearer must follow”: for example, the demonstratives this and that do not refer in the same way as the partitive quantifiers some and any.13 That is, in order to locate what their cardinal person represents – the space occupied by its designatum in the intended message – each set of pronouns must have its own spatial coordinates, its own system governing the uses of the individual pronouns. This constitutes a second component of their abstract meaning import and raises not only the question of how the two components are related but also that of how this meaning import is configured grammatically. We will approach the process of constituting the meaning import of a pronoun and configuring it grammatically during an act of speech, its psychogenesis (as opposed to its semiogenesis, the forming of its sign), from the point of view of Guillaume’s general theory of word formation in part-of-speech languages. He maintained that the psychogenesis of any word, predicative or non-predicative, is a process consisting of two phases, the first of which is a particularizing operation for distinguishing a word’s meaning from that of all other words, a meaning applicable throughout its own range of representation. In his words: “A word, whether a lexical word or a grammatical word, that is, every word, is the expression of a particular idea universalized as much as possible on the inside.”14 In substantives, this particularizing operation, which he sometimes called ideogenesis, calls to mind the sort of particular idea or concept that we call a lexeme – what distinguishes one substantive from all others – whereas in pronouns it evokes the abstract sort of meaning that distinguishes grammatical words (non-predicative parts of speech) from substantives and other lexical words (predicative parts of speech). That is, the first phase of a pronoun’s psychogenesis differs from the ideogenesis of substantives since it brings to mind, not the nature of its designatum, but a particular way of locating its designatum in the referential field. Its own way of referring to the intended message is what distinguishes one subsystem of pronouns (e.g. demonstratives) from all others (personal, indefinite, possessive, etc. pronouns), and, within a given subsystem, what distinguishes one pronoun from the other(s). As in the formation of substantives and other lexical words, the second phase of forming a pronoun’s meaning import, morphogenesis, generalizes the abstract meaning resulting from ideogenesis by means of categories leading up to the part of speech. Although most pronouns appear to have the same synthetic case as do substantives,

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enabling the noun phrase to have either a support (subject) function or an import (object, etc.) function in the sentence, the old analytical cases are still represented in most personal pronouns, as well as in who and whom. The system of number is made explicit by some personal pronouns and the demonstratives (this/that vs. these/ those) but remains implicit elsewhere (Who is/are leaving?). Whether distinctions of gender (animate vs. inanimate), as expressed by he/ she vs. it, someone vs. something, who vs. what, etc., are found in all other pronouns is a question that remains to be explored. In short, the same general bi-phase system of word formation is found in both predicative and non-predicative parts of speech, but to determine whether the second phase of pronoun formation is identical to that of substantives, or even whether all pronouns have the same morphogenetic itinerary, will call for further observation and reflection. This overall view of how a word’s meaning content is formed, its psychogenesis, gives us a preliminary distinction and raises the first question in trying to analyze a pronoun: where do the two components of its meaning import arise during its psychogenesis – in the abstract notional import15 of the first phase (corresponding to the substantive’s ideogenesis) or during the morphogenesis of the second phase? Fortunately, as pointed out in the essay on person, Guillaume gives some clear indications regarding where cardinal person arises in the predicative parts of speech. When he states that in the substantive cardinal person is “incorporated into the lexeme,”16 he obviously views it as arising during ideogenesis and not during morphogenesis, where the categories of gender, number, and case configure the lexeme. Later, when he states that a substantive’s lexeme is “an essential superscripting (intitulation) of person,”17 he specifies the relation between lexeme and person: because the lexeme represents the nature of what is being talked about, it provides a lexical characterization or determination of what occupies the extent of space represented by cardinal person. This gives the substantive its capacity for internal incidence. What we can understand from these and other reflections by Guillaume is that cardinal person is found, more or less characterized by the lexeme, in all the predicative parts of speech, and most clearly in the substantive, where the nature of the designatum – of what occupies the spatial support – is fully characterized by the lexeme. These considerations give us grounds to expect something similar in the pronoun. They lead us to explore the idea that the spatial

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coordinates proper to each pronoun and constituting part of its abstract notional import characterize its cardinal person, but not in the same way as the lexeme does in a substantive. That is, a pronoun’s abstract spatial coordinates do not represent the nature of its designatum, the nature of what occupies the extent of space represented by its cardinal person. Rather, they represent how to locate the designatum in the referential field. This field does not contain the sort of objective space that everyone sees when looking at a map of the world, but rather a personal space, that involved in a speaker’s intended message at the moment of speech. This distinction is important. Guillaume points out that, in our experience of the universe around us, space is “the support of all that exists” and that we have the means of representing this “immobile, continuous, undifferentiated space in our languages.”18 If we want to talk about something we experience or imagine, as speakers we must represent its place in this mental space, in that portion of our experiential universe involved in our momentary intended message. Thus, through its cardinal person and its own spatial coordinates, a pronoun can refer to a place within the intended message – now become the listener’s referential field – or even to the space occupied by the intended message itself, as we shall see. The point here is that pronouns do not work like a g p s , positioning things in a global space common to everyone, but rather like a “pps,” positioning things being talked about in a private or personal space where the constant reference point is the speaker’s place in his own experiential universe. This personal space, known only to oneself as speaker, is of course made known to others by representing it and expressing it through an act of language that provides others with the means of referring to it. Because one’s intended message is variable from one moment to another, the means of referring to it must be general enough to be adaptable to any message one wishes to express. Because one’s intended message is private, the means of referring to it must be systematic, based on a system shared by other speakers of the language. The ease with which we represent any message and express it to others is largely due to the category of grammatical person and the diverse means available for characterizing cardinal person in pronouns and in predicative parts of speech. We shall now turn to one such means, ordinal person, in order to see its relation to cardinal person.

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person

Viewing things in a broader context as we have just done provides cardinal person as a starting point for our exploration and gives a general preview of what we are looking for. It is commonly observed that a personal pronoun indicates what it is talking about, its designatum, by situating it with regard to the speaking relationship. This contrasts with, for example, a demonstrative situating its designatum in the intended message with regard to the speaker’s position in space, or a partitive quantifier (some or any), which situates its designatum as part of a whole that the speaker has in mind. From the general point of view that all personal pronouns represent both ordinal and cardinal person, our first task will be to examine the relation between these two representations of grammatical person in order to situate them in the psychogenesis (the process of constituting the meaning) of each pronoun. Only then will we be able to examine each of these pronouns to determine how its position within or beyond the speaking relationship is exploited in usage. Again we can get a lead from what Guillaume says about predicative parts of speech, particularly verbs: “cardinal person (la personne logique) in discourse is subjected to an ordinal characterization. It is characterized first or second or third. The characterization here is concomitant with, and representative of, its realization, or if you wish, its actualization.”19 In the light of Guillaume’s remark that “ordinal person is merely a characterization of cardinal person,”20 this can be understood not just for verbs but also for substantives, whose cardinal person is usually characterized as third person but occasionally, in the vocative, as second. Considering that cardinal person, representing the space occupied by the designatum, is actualized by ordinal person implies that, as a potential, it arises before ordinal person in the word-forming process. The relation between ordinal and cardinal is clearer in the case of the personal pronouns because ordinal person is the variable that differentiates them from other pronouns. That is, what distinguishes this subsystem of pronouns is its designating a place with regard to (within or outside) the speaking relationship, whereas other subsystems designate only a place outside it. This point calls for a certain clarification with regard to possessive pronouns because mine, for example, is sometimes considered to be a first-person pronoun.21

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A possessive pronoun evokes the possessor as a means of situating what is possessed, its referent in the intended message. In this respect, my/mine and your/yours differ radically from I/me, you because, as possessives, their representation of ordinal person does not characterize their cardinal person as situated within the speaking relationship. One can say Mine is/are …, but not *Mine am … Similarly for number and gender: mine, yours, his, etc. can all corefer to a substantive’s referent regardless of the substantive’s number (book or books) and its gender (tree or uncle) whereas the corresponding personal pronouns – it, they, he – are gender- and/or numberbound. These observations indicate that the ordinal person of the possessor does not determine where the possession is located – inside or outside the speaking relationship. The space occupied by what is possessed is always represented as outside the speaking relationship, always third person, a space in the intended message to which it corefers. Although its place in space is related to that of its possessor, its configuration for number (continuate or discontinuate) and gender (inanimate or animate) is variable, dependent on its coreferent. For us the important point here is that the same set of ordinal persons, with their respective gender and number, is found in both possessive and personal pronouns, but it does not have the same role in the two systems of pronoun. In the possessives, ordinal person helps specify the possessor as a means of indicating the place of the referent, in much the same way as a possessor noun phrase with -’s indicates the place of the possessee noun phrase:22 it points to where it is, but does not indicate how that place is represented grammatically (number and gender). However, these pronouns call for a more detailed study to clarify how they represent the relationship between possessor and what is possessed, and the significance of the -s distinguishing them as suppletives (ours, yours, etc.) as opposed to their completive role as determiners in a noun phrase (our, your, etc.). In the personal pronouns, on the other hand, ordinal person is central: it characterizes cardinal person, determining both the place of the referent and how it occupies that place – as a continuate or a discontinuate – and even the sort of entity – inanimate or animate – that occupies it. Thus, each of the personal pronouns has its own spatial coordinates distinguishing it according to rank – first and second persons representing one of the positions within the speaking relationship, third person representing some place outside it. That is, each

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pronoun makes explicit its own mental path that the hearer must follow in order to identify the referent the speaker has in mind. Because they differentiate the pronouns and predetermine their grammatical configuration, these different spatial coordinates concerning the speaking relationship must arise during the particularizing operation of ideogenesis as a characterization of each pronoun’s cardinal person. Actualized by an ordinal rank, the cardinal person of each pronoun can then be categorized by the appropriate gender, number, and case during the generalizing operation of morphogenesis leading to the part of speech. Comparison with reflexive pronouns will perhaps bring out more clearly how ordinal person characterizes cardinal person. Unlike possessive mine, which refers to someone or something outside the speaking relationship, myself is a first-person pronoun, referring to someone inside the speaking relationship, the speaker. Examining its components suggests how this is brought about. As a morpheme, my- expresses the possessor and -self what is possessed, but here the ordinal person of the possessor is attributed to what is possessed. That is, the ordinal person represented by my- characterizes the space represented by -self, giving the pronoun its first-person rank. The same applies to ourselves and yourself/ves. On the other hand, in the third-person reflexives herself, himself, itself, themselves it is the objective form23 that provides the morpheme to characterize -self. Thus, in each pronoun it appears that, as a morpheme, -self represents a space that must be characterized by an ordinal person with its own gender and number. In short, it appears that -self expresses cardinal person as a space actualized by the person possessing or occupying it. This would explain why reflexive and personal pronouns are found in all three ordinal persons, but not as possessives. However, why reflexives formed with his- and their- are considered substandard and why the reflexives cannot be used as subjects of a verb are problems yet to be explained. Thus the general view to be kept in mind in examining the personal pronouns is that their readily observed ordinal person characterizes, and thereby actualizes, their underlying cardinal person. Our task is to explore the different spatial coordinates of these pronouns, the meaning potential of each, in an attempt to discern how they relate to one another to form the operational system of ordinal person. This calls for observing each pronoun’s role in the sentence in light of its different forms (e.g. I vs. me) or lack thereof (you and

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it), and any variations of sense it expresses. These observations will provide a necessary basis upon which to try to infer a pronoun’s meaning potential, whereby it makes possible what is observed. Only then can the systemic relations between pronouns be explored. w i t h i n t h e s p e a k i n g r e l at i o n s h i p

I and Me According to Lyons, “the category of person depends crucially upon the grammaticalization of the participant-roles, and more especially upon the grammaticalization of the speaker’s reference to himself as the speaker.”24 The speaker (writer) is obviously a necessary component of any speaking (writing) situation. Although usually left implicit, that individual can be represented and expressed by I and me, pronouns distinguished from the others by the fact that they represent the awareness of one’s own self in the role of speaker. The representing of oneself by Self25 involves a certain “grammatical evasion from the person speaking” to the person spoken about, as Guillaume puts it.26 Although part of the experience of every speaker, the experience of oneself is quite personal, private, like any other experience. Being unique in the sense that nobody else can have the experience one has of one’s own self, it follows that in ordinary usage I and me are like proper nouns because their designatum is, for any speaker, always the same individual. As such, they illustrate most clearly how their own “first person” meaning – their representation of one’s experience of self in the role of speaker – characterizes their cardinal person in a quite specific way. In the terms of our analysis, this implies that the meaning import of I and me includes both a notional representation of the experience one has of one’s own self and a representation of cardinal person as its spatial support situated within the speaking relationship in the position of speaker. That is to say, I and me represent both the impressions one has of oneself as a human person and the space one occupies in the intended message. Furthermore, since the representation of oneself imposes individualizing characteristics on that spatial support, these pronouns always refer to the same space. This entails that, for anyone as a speaker, I and me offer no variation in the entity they represent: neither their extent of reference nor their place in the intended message varies, because the individual

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they represent is always the same. As a consequence, they require no antecedent or other contextual indication to orient the listener to the referent27 even though their referent changes every time the speaker changes. Among the personal pronouns only I and me can be considered to be “proper” pronouns for a particular speaker, but they have other uses which are quite different in this respect. Urban discusses uses of I where it calls to mind, as a sort of “proxy” speaker, a self other than that of the actual speaker of the sentence, as in reported speech (He said, “I am going”), in puppet theatres, and the like.28 Writers of course can designate the self of a character in a novel as speaker, with punctuation generally indicating a change of speaker. That is, in such uses, the Self of the remembered or imagined speaker, and not that of the actual speaker/writer, characterizes the spatial support represented by cardinal person, so I is used as an imagined “proper” pronoun. This possibility can even be extended to things with an effect of personification, as in examples such as a sign seen in a store, I’m a shopping basket – please use me, or I’m not in service seen on a bus.29 Here, labelling the object with the written sentence ensures that cardinal person will be understood to represent the place of the object, not that of the writer, and yet ordinal person situates it within the speaking relationship as speaker. Although the pronoun cannot be said to attribute Self to such objects, it does attribute one characteristic assumed to be present in all the other uses of I, namely the capacity to speak. To account for the resulting expressive effect, Wales makes the interesting proposal that metaphor is involved here, a question that cannot be pursued at this point.30 These uses, where I is not used as a “proper” pronoun in the strict sense, thus bring out the above distinction within the notional import of ‘first person’ between representation of self (proper or proxy) and the position of speaker within the speaking relationship. Important to note here is what is necessarily presupposed of any entity fulfilling that role: its (perhaps momentary) capacity to speak. Another point can be brought out by comparing I and me with the possessive mine. Although sometimes considered to be first person, mine is, as we saw above, third person because its cardinal person represents the place occupied by what is possessed and not by the possessor, the speaker. The representation of the speaker’s self is part of the meaning input of mine and does help characterize its cardinal person space, but only to the point of distinguishing that

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space in the referential field from other spaces, not to the point of identifying what occupies the space, as I and me do. On the other hand, it is not clear what is involved in uses such as I’m over there somewhere when speaking of one’s car in a parking lot (cf. Mine is …). A similar use – I am in first place “spoken by a gambler at a horserace” (cf. My horse is …) – is cited by Wales, who makes the interesting suggestion that it may be “a kind of metonymic extension.”31 It will probably require a deeper understanding of the difference between possessive and personal pronouns to be able to explain this use satisfactorily. These considerations all indicate that in a pronoun’s ideogenesis its cardinal person is characterized by ordinal person, and that the outcome of ideogenesis, cardinal + ordinal person, provides the notional “matter” to be formed by the configuring systems of the pronoun’s morphogenesis. Thus the unique characterization of cardinal person by the notional import of I and me predetermines how they can be configured grammatically: as singular in number and animate in gender, with their subgender, either feminine or masculine, presumably depending on the way the actual speaker represents her/his own self. Added to their categorization for number and gender, I and me are categorized differently for case, which determines their capacity for establishing syntactic relations in a sentence. While I is practically limited to the role of subject, providing a spatial support for the predicate, me is found mostly as direct object, indirect object, and object of a preposition. This corresponds to what constitutes the category of case proposed for the substantive, support case and import case, with the major difference that it is not, as for the substantive, the position of the noun phrase in the sentence, but the declension of the pronoun that makes its case explicit. Guillaume often spoke of the subject’s person as being “dynamic,” and the object’s person as “negative dynamic.”32 Duffley characterizes the same two functions as “event-originator” and “event-conditionee” respectively, bringing out more clearly the relation with the verb.33 In the subject, person is in support case to provide a syntactic support for the predicate. This entails providing a necessary spatial condition, usually the agent, for the realization of the verb’s event. By contrast, as object of the verb, person is in import case, finding a syntactic support in the verb. This involves bringing out its inactive role of being on the receiving end of the verb’s event, of being conditioned by it, if only

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to the extent of being situated in time. This of course raises the question of transitivity, which cannot be pursued here. Looking at the difference between I and me as one of case, support vs. import, involving a distinction of dynamism – originator vs. conditionee – in the syntactic relation established, can also help us understand the use of me alone in answers – “Who wants a chocolate?” “Me!” – where there is no syntactic incidence to be made. Here the pronoun exercises its import case through referential incidence by finding support in the place already designated (but left empty) by who in the first speaker’s intended message. That is, even in its import case, me, like any other pronoun, brings in a representation of cardinal person, enabling it to effect coreference to situate its ordinal (first) person. Likewise the difference between support and import cases may give a basis for reflecting on uses in coordinating constructions such as the following from Huddleston and Pullum: after a preposition: between you and I, an opportunity for you and I, without you or I knowing it; and as direct object: to represent Helen and I.34 Although me would probably be more common in such uses, I is considered acceptable in certain dialects of English, and one cannot but question the role of the coordinator here. Do and and or simply make a syntactic link between two nominals each referring to its own space in the intended message? This would appear to be what is expressed when me is used. On the other hand, with I do the conjunctions link the two spaces into one complex space, thus combining them into one noun phrase? This would involve adding you to I so that the speaker could get the impression of the second pronoun being the support of the first. If the coordinator is capable of both roles,35 the usual import case, me, would be found when and links two separate spaces, making two noun phrases, whereas the support case, I, would be found when it adds the first pronoun (import case) to the second (support case) within one noun phrase. On the other hand, the use of me in Tina and me sat by the window looking down on all the twinkling lights, considered non-standard, may arise from the impression of adding me to Tina, i.e. me being import case. Obviously, such speculations call for an analysis of the coordinator’s mechanism, its operational possibilities in the sentence, which appear to be more versatile than those of prepositions. Only a clear view of how and, or, etc. function will enable us to explain such uses, as well as far less common ones such as There’s a tendency for he and I to clash.

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These and other details of usage, such as those illustrated in Jespersen,36 call for more detailed observation in light of the principles of analysis proposed for pronouns: cardinal person representing the space occupied by the referent, and the pronoun’s particular notional content constituting its ordinal person, which together characterize its cardinal person by pointing to its place in the intended message. We have seen that representing our awareness of our own identity characterizes the cardinal person of I and me as a bounded space and makes them “proper” pronouns in uses depicting the actual speaker. They can also depict “proxy” speakers and even things as speaker, but in all uses they attribute the capacity to speak to their referent. Although differentiated on the basis of their syntactic possibilities, support vs. import, this does not affect their referential ­possibilities, their cardinal person. You has no such case distinction but does have quite different referential possibilities.

You Unlike I, you is variable in extensity. It can represent a single addressee as well as a group of people addressed directly such as an audience, in which case it is a second-person plural: you + you + you … Such uses indicate that, without any change in sign, you can signify both one individual or a number of individuals. That is, its cardinal person can be characterized as a space occupied by one or more addressees. On the other hand, the fact that we say You are but not *You is suggests that even for a single addressee there is some sort of multiplicity involved. As we shall see below when discussing they, this could well arise from the fact that you is epicene. That is, you is configured animate in gender, permitting either one of its subgenders, feminine or masculine, when it represents a single addressee. The relation between cardinal and ordinal persons is brought out by you thanks to its variable extensity. The cardinal person of you represents the space occupied by one or more entities, usually human persons, a space outside that of the speaker but not necessarily within the speaking relationship. Its ordinal person usually characterizes that space as within the speaking relationship, thereby depicting the individual(s) as the addressee(s). That is, in the sentence, the spatial support of you represents both the inalienable space of the addressee(s) and its position within the speaking relationship, that of second person. This is a result of the speaker’s

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intention to make the individual(s) concerned the addressee(s), to subject them to an act of language. This dependence on the speaker for its role as addressee will be considered below when considering the invariability of you for case. Besides the addressee(s) actually present, you can represent others not present, as in: In your country you drive on the other side.

Here the reference to the addressee(s) present is included without being specified, since “what holds for people in general will characteristically hold for you personally.”37 Bolinger considers you in such uses to express what is “typical and normal … relating somehow to the here and now.”38 The expression “people in general” should be understood here as all those living in the country evoked, i.e. all possible addressees. Thus in: I think Smith is a really great speaker, whether you agree with him or not.

you can refer to anyone who hears him speak. And in: You couldn’t hear yourself talk, it was so noisy.

it “is understood as applying to those present at the time (most likely including the speaker),”39 and even by implication the addressee, had he or she been present. Whitley gives an example where even the hearer who was not yet born at the time described figures as a potential addressee: When my great-grandad was a boy, you could still buy candy for a penny a stick.40

Finally, in: You can never tell what will happen.

you really is used “with reference to ‘people in general,’”41 (Quirk et al., 353), because it evokes a situation applying to any human being as a possible addressee, thus implying the speaker as well.

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These uses bring out that you has different expressive effects ranging from a single addressee to all possible addressees. When you is given an extensity beyond the minimum of the individual(s) actually addressed, its cardinal person is characterized by all those who, given the situation, might be addressees; these uses suggest an unbounded support space. That is, in indefinite, “people in general” uses, because it evokes potential participants, you reaches its greatest degree of generalization, its maximum extent of reference, implying thereby even the speaker, as in the last example. Here the abstract notional import of you, its ordinal person, clearly characterizes the space represented by cardinal person to determine its extensity, but even at its maximum it is limited to people, a fact bringing out what is perhaps obvious: the cardinal person of you is characterized in such a way as to predetermine its gender as animate.42 In another respect, you differs from most of the other personal pronouns: it has the same form for both support and import cases. That is, whether used as subject or as object – direct, indirect, of a preposition – it has the same sign, and in this resembles substantives in Modern English. In our discussion of I and me, it was proposed that me is required because I, as both instigator of the speaking relationship and subject providing a necessary syntactic support for initiating (or otherwise conditioning) the event expressed by the verb, involves a dynamism that cannot be reduced to the role of object depending on the event, or of requiring a preposition to find its place in the sentence. You, on the other hand, far from being the instigator of the speaking relationship, is co-opted into it by the speaker, and so the person(s) spoken to is (are) necessarily in a dependent position in that relationship, a position involving a lesser degree of dynamism when compared with I. Thus, because of its ‘second person’ notional import, you is partially reduced in dynamism, and this leaves it capable of being formed by either support case, to play the syntactic role of subject, or import case, to play a dependent syntactic role in the sentence. That is, you does not characterize its cardinal person in such a way as to predetermine its syntactic possibilities, and in this respect resembles substantives with their synthetic case. This suggested explanation of why a change in case is not reflected by a change in sign for you remains quite tentative, but will receive some confirmation when we discuss it below. You is also found in vocative uses such as the following: You, why haven’t you finished yet?

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In this, it differs from all the other personal pronouns for the obvious reason that other people can be addressed directly only in the second person. The fact that proper nouns and names as well as a number of common nouns, all naming people,43 can be used in this way indicates that their cardinal person can also be characterized by the second person. Bolinger gives an example of you “with more than a personal reference”:44 You’re smoking in your left rear brake there.

Here, as in a use of I mentioned above, there appears to be a certain identification between the person and the car, as though the addressee’s space includes that of the car, but this remains to be clarified. Quite different is a use arising in internal dialogue when one addresses a piece being fitted into a puzzle or a device being assembled, as in: You go in there.

or a vocative use when the piece does not fit in readily: Go in there, you!

Here the addressee is the piece. Its support space is characterized as capable of a passive role in the speech act. We have seen similar uses of I involving a certain personification, and will discuss below similar, more frequent occurrences with he and she. This expressive effect brings out clearly that you situates its referent within the speaking relationship, implying a capacity to participate in that relationship. Another use of you is found in examples such as: You students should form a society.

Huddleston and Pullum contrast this with the following example: You, the students, should form a society.

They consider that you in the latter example is the ordinary pronoun constituting a noun phrase, with the following noun phrase in

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apposition, but that in the former sentence it is a determiner replaceable by a demonstrative or article. The difference between the two uses of you is clearly brought out in vocative expressions such as You fool! where it functions as a determiner in the manner of the article in the third-person expletive The fool! – as opposed to You with the glasses! where it functions as a noun phrase similar to that in The person with the glasses! In both uses, it is the pronoun representing cardinal person characterized as second person that makes reference possible.45 This determiner use of you raises a question calling for further investigation. Although for some this use may not appear to be that of a pronoun,46 it is not in itself surprising that a personal pronoun should be found as a determiner since many other pronouns are found in both a completive use as a determiner and a suppletive use as a noun phrase (see my 2009 study). Thus you in the above determiner example limits the extensity of its noun phrase by specifying that the students being talked about are those being addressed. As we shall now see, we and us also have completive and suppletive uses.

We and Us Describing first person as designating the space occupied by the speaker in the speaking relationship applies to we and us, but the expression “first person plural” often applied to them is a misnomer. The term “plural” as normally used in the sense of ‘more than one’ cannot apply here because, as Boas and Powell pointed out some years ago, “[a] true first person plural is impossible, because there can never be more than one self.” Jespersen makes the same point – “we = I + one or more not-Is” – as does Lyons.47 That is, one’s own self cannot be pluralized, represented in other beings, so we and us include a representation of the speaker’s self and of another person or persons who could or do say the same thing, “a set of two or more that includes a speaker.”48 It might be objected that we is a ‘more than one’ plural when a number of people speak in unison saying the same thing, as in We will do it. The implication of this interpretation would then be an assimilation of me with others, a claim that the space I occupy includes a number of others. On the other hand, Jespersen maintains that “each individual ‘we will’ means really nothing more than ‘I will, and B and C … will, too,” an alternative interpretation of we which seems to reflect more faithfully those impressions of

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uniqueness associated with one’s own self. In writing, as in endorsing a legal document We, the undersigned …, a similar interpretation would be ‘I and the others …’ for each of the “joint signatories.”49 Examples such as these are called “exclusive” because the set evoked does not include the addressee(s). They are contrasted with uses of “inclusive we,” where the pronoun is understood to refer to both the speaker and the individual(s) addressed: We agree on this, don’t we? To be noted here is that inclusive we has the remarkable capacity to represent a space containing the two participants in the same act of speech, a use distinguishing we and us from the other pronouns. However, as Huddleston and Pullum point out, “a set containing both speaker and addressee is referred to by 1st person we, not 2nd person you,”50 an observation indicating that the inclusive/exclusive distinction is not a distinction between different positions on the level of the system, but one arising in usage reflecting possible actualizations of we’s meaning potential. Thus, the cardinal person of we and us is characterized by their notional import as representing the space for a group or set including the speaker as well as addressee(s) and/or (possible) speakers. In fact, as Quirk et al. point out: “The reference of ‘inclusive we’ can be progressively enlarged … from those involved in the immediate speech situation to the whole human race” as in We now know that the earth is round. This capacity to extend their scope to a generic sense suggests that their cardinal person can provide an unbounded spatial support. This is in sharp contrast with I but does resemble you in its “underlying semantic extension,” as Bolinger puts it, although you “does not go as far as we, which involves the speaker in the action more or less directly.”51 On the other hand, as Quirk et al. point out,52 there are occasional uses where we and us can be used to refer to a single individual, such as the “virtually obsolete” royal we. More common is the use of we in scholarly writing to refer to the writer where I might appear “somewhat egotistical”: As we showed a moment ago …

One gets the impression that these uses depict the speaker or writer not just as self but also as monarch or writer, as though adding a particular role to one’s self-space, a role implying a relation with the addressee(s). Thus, commenting on the example:

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In the next chapter we will describe the methodology used.

Huddleston and Pullum point out that although “it will in fact be the author alone who will describe the methodology … there remains some suggestion that the reader is being invited to engage in a joint enterprise.” This suggestion comes out even more clearly in their example: Give us a lick of your ice-cream.

“which can be interpreted with us referring to the speaker alone” but inviting the addressee’s participation in the giving.53 Similarly, a teacher might say: Now then, let’s have a look at that project, shall we?

implying at least the student’s assent, and thus allowing the teacher to avoid “overtly claiming authority.”54 In each of these examples, the pronoun depicts the writer/speaker in a role involving the reader/addressee as a prospective participant, thus implying a multiple spatial support. A different use occurs when a doctor says: How are we feeling today? Have we taken our medicine?

Here the focus is on the addressee with the “implication of [the speaker] sharing the problem” with the patient addressed, i.e. an expressive effect of empathy. Likewise, a remark such as: Oh dear, we are a bit cranky this morning, aren’t we?

can indicate the state of mind of the person talked to, such as a child, while implying the possibility of the speaker’s sharing it, but here it would “convey mockery.”55 That is, we here refers to speaker + person spoken to, but granted the speaking situation, the reference to the speaker is recognized as ironic. A similar use could also occur in talking about someone else such as the boss, in which case it would imply both speaker and addressee(s) sharing the bad mood. That is, in this interpretation, inclusive we would express a

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set including the boss as a potential addressee. The attributing of crankiness to the speaker and the actual addressee(s) would of course be recognized as ironic, whence the impression of mock empathy. This can be contrasted with the sentence arising in a situation where the speaker recognizes the crankiness of all three persons involved and no such expressive effects arise. In these occasional uses, then, speaker and addressee are involved, though one or the other’s role in the situation is evoked as merely possible. And in the “cranky” example, the pretended empathy of the speaker and of the addressee(s) is evoked in a situation where it not applicable, thus giving rise to the ironic effect. In all these examples, it appears to be this supplement to the first person which calls for the use of we and us rather than I/me, or you, and gives rise to the different expressive effects. The evidence here is scanty, but perhaps further observation of usage will bring to light other uses that will provide the basis for a more general explanation. The way we and us vary from a minimum, representing the speaker and possible inclusion of the addressee, to the whole human race “is really a continuum.”56 This variability in extensity is a consequence in discourse of the way the pronoun is formed. We have seen in the discussion of I and me that it is a pronoun’s abstract notional meaning which characterizes its cardinal person and predetermines how it will be categorized in morphogenesis. Thus the complex notional import of we and us – speaker + potential speaker(s), speaker + addressee(s) actual or potential – preconditions their gender as animate and their number as plural.57 What determines how far the plural extends – the pronoun’s extensity in discourse – depends, as we have seen, on what the speaker wants to talk about (refer to) by means of the pronoun: self and a role; self and addressee(s); self and any number of possible participants, speakers, or addressees. This variability calls for some indication in the context and/or the situation to supplement the pronoun’s spatial coordinates in positioning the designatum in the intended message. In this respect, we and us, like you, resemble common nouns, whereas I and me, as we have seen, resemble proper nouns. Finally, among the uses remaining to be examined, the following is worth mentioning here: We supporters of a federal Europe will eventually win the argument.

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Huddleston and Pullum, distinguishing this from the appositive construction (We, the supporters of a federal Europe  …), consider we here to be a determiner because it is replaceable by a demonstrative or article.58 That is, we appears to function here not as a suppletive pronoun, its usual function, but as a completive pronoun, which, as I have argued elsewhere,59 provides a spatial support for the rest of the noun phrase. That is, its cardinal person represents the space occupied by the substantive’s lexeme and situates it inside the speaking relationship, thus specifying the reference of the noun phrase as the speaker and potential speakers.60 Similarly, in a familiar use such as: Us girls can always take a joke.61

us limits the reference to the group of girls including the speaker. Like you, we and us can be formed as completive pronouns to function as determiners representing the extensity of a substantive’s lexeme and situating it within the speaking relationship. Thus it appears to be their extension, their range of representation offering a “continuum” of possible extensities, that makes it possible for these three pronouns to be used in a completive function. The situation is of course quite different for I and me because, like proper nouns, their range of representation is limited to the space occupied by a single person, the speaker, and so they cannot function as a determiner for a substantive. We will return to this in our discussion of third-person pronouns. o u t s i d e t h e s p e a k i n g r e l at i o n s h i p

It is worth recalling at this point that the frequent definition of third person as that which is spoken of has been rejected as inadequate because each of the personal pronouns speaks of something or someone. What distinguishes the third-person pronouns she, he, it, and they from the others is that they designate something or someone as outside the speaking relationship, as non-participants, what Lyons considers “a fundamental, and ineradicable difference.”62 Thus their referents are not limited to participants in that relationship (humans or other personified beings) but can include any being representable as occupying space. That is, the representational range of third-person pronouns is limited not by their rank, but by

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the other notional elements characterizing their cardinal person and predetermining their gender and number. In one respect, this puts them on par with pronouns belonging to other systems such as the demonstratives, a fact that has led one linguist to consider them to be bereft of person: “‘third person’ is in fact a ‘non-person.’”63 This view, based on the “short-hand substitute” function of these pronouns and not on their makeup, fails to take into account the more general view that cardinal person is involved in all pronouns and substantives, as well as the systemic view that opposes these four pronouns to I, you, and we on the basis of their position, within vs. beyond the speaking relationship. As we shall see below, this is the parameter that distinguishes the personal pronouns from other pronouns. Because the space represented by their cardinal person is characterized differently, each of these pronouns has different limitations on its range of representation. Thus, while cardinal person in she, he, and it represents a single space, in they it represents a multiple space, whence the grammatical difference between singular and plural. He and she are limited to the range of beings perceived as possible participants in the speaking relationship, whereas it is limited to beings not perceived as possible participants, whence the grammatical difference of gender, between inanimate and animate,64 she expressing the subgender feminine, he the subgender masculine as well as coreferring to the general notion of ‘human being’ in traditional usage.65 We will discuss and illustrate these distinctions below, beginning with it because of the way it has often been maltreated by grammarians as a “dummy” in spite of the fact that it manifests a capacity, not found in he and she, for representing an unbounded space, coreferring to the space occupied by a ‘mass’ noun.

It Grammars often point out that it, like the other third-person pronouns, in examples such as: We tried the door, but it was locked.

“refers to its antecedent,” the door. Explaining the use of it in this way, by describing its expressive effect as recalling or referring to some word or group of words already expressed in the sentence or discourse, raises two problems. Using “refer” here to designate a

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supposed operation between two components of discourse can be confusing. For one thing, as Huddleston and Pullum point out, this term is usually used in a very different sense, namely to call to mind the operation of a linguistic meaning designating something outside language, a designatum or referent.66 To avoid confusion, I will use the terms “refer” and “referent” not in the first – “textual” or “endophoric” – sense, but in the second sense of designating something outside language. Secondly, describing a result of using it, an expressive effect, does not explain the use because it does not describe how the expressive effect was produced. It should therefore lead to the question: How does the pronoun bring this about? The same grammarians point out that it is not by “referring to its antecedent” but by “coreference”: the two noun phrases “are definite referring expressions referring to the same referent.” Similarly for Lyons: “We will not say that a pronoun refers to its antecedent but rather that it refers to the referent of the antecedent expression with which it is correlated.”67 These comments raise the crucial problem: what correlates the pronoun with the preceding noun phrase? What in the makeup of the door and it enables them to refer to the same referent, whereas no other component in the sentence does? We will return to that question in a moment, but first the idea of reference must be clarified because, for Huddleston and Pullum, it is not a matter of coreference in examples such as: If she caught a fish, she will no doubt have given it to her father. I want to buy a filing-cabinet. We could keep all these papers in it. Dig a large hole and hide these bones in it.

“The antecedents [of it] here do not have reference: existence of actual fish, or filing-cabinets, or holes is not entailed.” Refusing reference to the antecedent noun phrase here is a consequence of the way they define a referent: “a person or other entity in the outside world,” i.e. having existence outside the speaker’s mind.68 However, their comment on the above examples continues: “But in each case I [the speaker] envisage a hypothetical situation in which an entity of the kind described does exist, and this makes it possible to refer to this hypothetical entity.” The idea of reference is ambivalent here: the pronoun can “refer” to something the speaker has in mind even though it has no existence outside the mind, and yet the

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phrases with substantives “do not have reference” because their referent does not exist in the “outside world.” Shifting the sense of these three important terms according to whether or not they are used of noun phrases denoting something outside the mind is confusing, and moreover unnecessary for the linguist. Here we will use “refer” and “reference” to designate the operation of applying meaning to its correlate in the speaker’s mind, and “referent” will designate the mental correlate referred to, i.e. what in the speaker’s intended message has been represented by the word or phrase. Whatever we say or write refers to something outside language, something in the speaker’s/writer’s mind, and this regardless of whether or not that mental referent corresponds to something existing outside the mind. That is, whether a noun phrase involves a substantive or a pronoun, its referent will always be something in the speaker’s intended message, and this may involve referring to something merely implied, as in the following example of they: Sampson himself did baby-sitting, and they didn’t mind a bit about hurting his feelings.69

Defining the notion of reference in this way70 – i.e. the listener or reader relating one mental entity (the meaning of a pronoun, a noun phrase, a sentence, etc.) to another mental entity (its extra-linguistic counterpart in the speaker’s momentary experiential awareness) – is based on the fact that we cannot speak of something unless we already have it in mind and want to speak of it, a view that supports that of Wales, who stresses “the importance of our own mental activity as users of English … in assigning the appropriate reference.”71 I will therefore argue that it in each of the above sentences has the same referent as the noun phrase, a fish, a filing-cabinet, a hole: that in each case it corefers to the same thing in the speaker’s message. It does not, however, corefer in the same way as the noun phrase refers. The different manners of effecting reference to the same referent can be described briefly as the noun phrase designating the nature of something and its place in the intended message vs. the pronoun designating only its place. To summarize what was brought out in some detail in my volume on the noun phrase, in a determiner + substantive type of phrase such as a fish, the substantive’s lexeme represents the referent as a spatial entity of a certain nature

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and the determiner a represents the space it occupies in the intended message as part of that lexeme’s range of representation, i.e. as its extensity in that use (here, a single fish). The speaker completes the construction of the noun phrase by making the substantive incident to the determiner’s space. The listener can then refer to what the determiner has represented – a space in the intended message occupied by the referent – and understand the nature of the entity in that space. The pronoun it cannot represent the specific nature of the entity, but it does represent the space the entity occupies, and so it can refer to that space. Since this space has already been represented by the previous phrase, both speaker and addressee have it in mind and so can corefer to it, thus giving rise to the expressive effect often found in grammars of a pronoun recalling or relating to an antecedent in the sentence. This brings us to the next question: what in the makeup of a fish and of it permits them to effect reference? The answer proposed here, the basic point put forth in this essay, is that what permits spatial reference is cardinal person, postulated as a formative element of all substantives and pronouns. In a study on lexical semantics I have argued that during a substantive’s ideogenesis, its lexeme characterizes its cardinal person resulting in an actualized lexeme with its extension as a spatial support. This result is then configured, grammatically formed, during the substantive’s morphogenesis for a particular use (as in a fish in the above example). The substantive is then made incident to the determiner whose cardinal person represents the lexeme’s actualized spatial support as an extensity, as a particular extent of reference, thereby permitting the noun phrase to refer to its referent. In a pronoun, there is of course no lexeme to characterize cardinal person and limit it to designating a referent of a particular nature. In each pronoun, however, there are more abstract notional elements to characterize its cardinal person and precondition its morphological configuration, as we have seen for first- and secondperson pronouns. Thus, to represent a space in the intended message, the cardinal person of it is characterized as third person and so represents a space outside the speaking relationship like other third-person pronouns. However, it remains to bring out what characterizing elements predetermine its number and its gender. This is not the place to go into detail on the way each of these grammatical configurations of it is exploited in usage. Reid and Wales, as well as various grammars, have brought out the particular expressive effects

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arising from number, as when using either it or they to corefer to entities perceived as collectives. Below we shall look briefly at uses of it vs. he/she to corefer to entities perceived as humans, animals, objects, etc. Here we will explore what enables it alone among the personal pronouns to be used in ways which have earned it the reputation of being “semantically empty,” a “dummy” with “no identifiable meaning.” Such descriptions can arise only if one ignores the abstract notional and grammatical elements contributing to a pronoun’s formation as a word. In fact, the very idea of a word being used without meaning betokens a conception of human language quite removed from the reality of its existence as spoken by speakers and understood by listeners. Perhaps the best place to start exploring some of these uses is an example from Quirk et al. showing that “it can corefer to a whole … sentence”:72 Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in 410 AD. It was the end of civilization as the West had known it.

Once the first sentence is expressed and understood, its meaning is referred to the writer’s intended message where the complex idea, part of that message, occupies its place. In the second sentence, it represents this space with what occupies it, and the predicate adds something to that. When the meaning of the second sentence is understood and referred to the intended message, its complex idea is related to that of the first sentence, giving rise to an even more complex idea as its outcome. Of interest here is that it can corefer to the place occupied by a complex idea as expressed by a sentence or even “a sequence of sentences,” as Quirk et al. point out: Many students never improve. They get no advice and therefore keep repeating the same mistakes. It’s a terrible shame.

This capacity of it to represent the space occupied by some idea(s) already expressed would appear to be exploited also for an idea the speaker has in mind to express but has not yet represented and expressed. In such uses, it represents the place the idea occupies in the intended message and the rest of the sentence represents the idea that occupies that place, as in: It was a great pleasure to see you again.

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In this use, to see you again could replace “anticipatory it”73 as subject. Considering the infinitive phrase to be “notionally the subject of the sentence”74 brings out its role of indicating what occupies the space represented by it, but this does not entail that “[t]he resulting sentence thus contains two subjects” because the role of subject is a grammatical, not a lexical, function. In the above sentence, the complement is made incident to was to constitute the predicate, which is then made incident to, and finds a spatial support in, it. The postposed component can sometimes replace it, as above and in: It doesn’t matter what you do. / What you do doesn’t matter.

but this is not possible in: It may be that she no longer trusts you. / *That she no longer trusts you may be.

The postposed clause can be preposed without replacing it in an example such as: It would be a pity if we missed the show. / If we missed the show it would be a pity.

These and other syntactic possibilities and limitations indicate varying relations between the components of the sentence, as in the last example where the if-clause appears to be an adverbial. This also applies to anticipatory it as object, such as in these examples:75 You must find it exciting working here. / You must find working here exciting. I owe it to you that the jury acquitted me. / *I owe that the jury acquitted me to you.

In these and other cases mentioned in grammars, the variable, lexical or grammatical, gives rise to the different relations,76 but in all cases anticipatory it appears to provide the representation of an empty space to be filled by some other component of the sentence. But in uses where the pronoun could be omitted, such as:

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He can’t understand it that you dislike him.

it is found “when the topic has already been introduced”77 or is otherwise known. This suggests another case of coreference rather than anticipatory it. Anticipatory usage comes out clearly where it refers to a space to be filled by a sequence of sentences, as in another version of an example discussed above: It’s a terrible shame. Many students never improve. They get no advice and therefore keep repeating the same mistakes.

One gets the impression here that it represents the space occupied by the intended message, but even though it is characterized as “a terrible shame” we do not know what is shameful, what occupies that space, until we understand the following sentences and refer their meaning to it. The speaker must of course have had the whole intended message in mind, perhaps only vaguely, before undertaking this discourse, but judging by the expressive effect mentioned in grammars, the impression of shame was most prominent in the speaker’s mind in this version. A different expressive effect is brought out by an ad outside a restaurant:78 You got it! We have it! We want you to work for us.

Thanks to the third sentence, the reader understands and can fill in what the writer had in mind for each it. Finally, the vague extensity of it in anticipatory uses can be contrasted with its extensity when (co)referring to a single entity by means of an example which, out of context, is ambiguous: It’s good to eat.

As Quirk et al. point out,79 it could be understood to evoke either a single article of food, say, a fish indicated by a gesture, or the notion of eating, i.e. understood as representing either a bounded space or an unbounded space. Quirk et al. distinguish between it in anticipatory uses like the above and it “used as an ‘empty’ or ‘prop’ subject,”80 as in:

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It’s half past five. It’s getting dark. It’s a long way from here to Cairo. It’s warm today.

Such sentences “cover the total environment, not just some object in it,” according to Chase.81 In such “ambient” uses, as Bolinger calls them, I interpret it as representing the mental space occupied by the intended message itself, and so would consider it here to represent an empty space to be filled by the predicate, as in anticipatory uses. What appears to distinguish the two types of use is that ambient uses are found “especially in expressions denoting time, distance or atmospheric conditions,”82 conditions present in every speaking situation and applying not to a particular space in the intended message but to the setting as a whole. To indicate which of these constant parameters of our experience one has in mind, it suffices to attribute to ambient it some momentary condition. We can also include here an example such as: How’s it going?

as a query about “life in general”83 since the life of participants is certainly a general condition underlying any speaking situation. Thus, anticipatory it and ambient it are similar “informationally,” as Quirk et al. point out:84 in each use the predicate, made incident through the verb to the lexically empty subject, provides “information” about it. The background space evoked by support it is not always something as extensive as time or weather. In: It’s cold out.

the adjective characterizes a component of every speaking situation, the ambient temperature, and the adverb indicates what it represents: namely, the space outside. By contrast, the adverbial phrase in: It’s cold in here.

indicates that it represents the space within the particular room or building where the speaker is. Adjectives such as stuffy or smoky here would indicate that one has in mind the air in the same place, while

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cosy or spooky suggest the feelings it evokes. In each of these uses, ambient it appears to represent an unbounded, empty space calling for an adverb in the last two examples. As a consequence, the referent of it is quite vague, and this has led some grammarians to consider it “meaningless.” This minimally specified space represented by it in such uses is to be contrasted with that85 in: A. Who is it? B. It’s the milkman.

Here it represents an empty bounded space specified by who as animate in the question and identified as to its occupant in the answer. Similarly, in a coreference use such as: A: How’s your steak? B: It’s cold.

it represents a bounded space, that already defined by steak, but its occupant is already known. Raising the question of whether such varied uses manifest “the same it,” Bolinger remarks that “they are at least connected by a gradient too smooth for separation to be anything but arbitrary.” Likewise, Wales considers them “on a ‘cline’ or ‘continuum’ … between ‘anticipatory it’ at one end … and it to refer to objects, plants, animals, and human beings at the other.”86 The gradient involved here would appear to be that of different extensities, extending from the space of the intended message as a whole, through intermediate, vaguely defined areas, to some bounded entity within it. This does not, however, appear to include a “generic” use of it in the sense proposed by some grammarians, as we shall see below. It is found in a number of other uses87 sometimes considered to be idioms. In each of them, it represents as an intermediate extensity the space occupied by what both speaker and listener already have in mind, as in a shared activity: Gently does it. At last we’ve made it.

or a reaction of the addressee: Take it easy. Just cool it, OK? Hold it!

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or a known consequence: Now you’re in for it.

or some known undertaking (which might have been mentioned before, making these coreference uses): Let’s get on with it. Make it snappy! He made a go of it.

In the following example, the activities are merely implied by the infinitives hotel, inn, and pub: We would sleep out on fine nights; and hotel it, and inn it, and pub it when it was wet.88

In an example from Huddleston and Pullum: A: What would you like for breakfast? B: French toast. A: French toast it is.89

it as subject appears to depict the empty space in A’s mind represented by what and filled by B’s answer, hence the effect of a “confirming construction.” If this explanation of it as ambient (prop) subject and as object with no explicit referent proves valid when confronted with other examples of such uses, it will lend confirmation to the explanation proposed above for it when the pronoun is used to corefer with a preceding noun phrase, and for anticipatory it. That is, in the uses examined so far, it refers to a space in the speaker’s intended message, a space already occupied as in coreferring uses and in the French toast example, or occupied by something arising later in the sentence as in anticipatory uses, or implicit in any situation (time, space, life, etc.) and specified by a particular manifestation in the complement, or finally the space occupied by something prominent at that moment in the experience of both speaker and listener. The advantage of this more general explanation is that it avoids considering it in some uses as non-referring or dummy or empty, and dismissing certain uses as idioms. This supports Bolinger’s view “that all

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the uses of it stem from a common semantic base.” His view “that the context expands or contracts the reference of it” helps explain how the listener arrives at the extensity represented by the speaker, who, with the potential made available by the pronoun’s cardinal person, can represent the space occupied by the intended referent, whether wide or narrow, already occupied or to be occupied.90 It remains for us to look at the notional elements of it that characterize its cardinal person in such a way that it is distinct from the other third-person pronouns. It is opposed to they in number. That is, like she and he, it calls for a single space as a support, whereas they calls for a multiple space, as we shall see. It differs from the other pronouns in its inanimate gender: she and he have animate, and they, variable gender in usage. One wonders if it’s gender is not predetermined by the fact that it can represent an unbounded spatial support, a representation not apt to be subdivided into subgenders. After all, no substantive with a ‘mass’ or ‘noncount’ lexeme is found with animate gender, not even in the following example of anticipatory it with boy, which usually represents an animate being: “It’s not brutality,” murmured little Hartopp … “It’s boy, only boy.”91

Here the lexeme boy in the sense of ‘the nature of boy’ is expressed by a ‘mass’ noun. This implies that it has an unbounded spatial support and so must be configured grammatically by inanimate gender. That is, in our experience an entity perceived without spatial limits is not configured as an animate being, let alone as capable of participating in the speaking relationship. This capacity of it to corefer to the space occupied by an unbounded entity is common in ordinary speech: We have water but it has to be boiled.

This indicates that in it cardinal person can depict as a support an unbounded space not only situated outside the speaking relationship but excluded from it. Although it remains to clarify this relation between unbounded spatial representation and gender, these considerations give some grounds for proposing that the notional element characterizing the way it represents its spatial support predetermines both its subsequent categorization in the system of gender as

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inanimate and its categorization in the system of number as singular (or rather continuate, the more general term). Furthermore, this approach illustrates how the representational range of it can characterize its cardinal person in various uses to give rise to extensities varying from the single, vaguely defined, unbounded space of the intended message of “ambient” uses, to a vaguely defined unbounded space within the intended message such as water above, to the bounded space of a particular entity therein. As such, it, unlike I, can express different extensities but, unlike we, you, and they, within a single continuate space, not a multiple space. Our discussion of it thus helps bring out the basic postulate of this essay, namely that the role of cardinal person in pronouns, as in substantives, is to represent the space occupied by the intended message or something within it, a space characterized by each pronoun’s abstract notional input and configured by their grammatical morphology. It remains to discuss one other trait that distinguishes it from the other third-person pronouns, that of case: it does not express through its morphology the distinction between support and import cases permitting subject and object functions respectively. Guillaume often referred to the fact that in Indo-European languages, neuter nouns and pronouns have the same form for nominative and accusative cases. This he suggested was due to a difference between animate (masculine or feminine) and inanimate (neuter) genders, the former involving an impression of activity or movement, “dynamism” as he called it, the latter of reduced dynamism, of passivity.92 As a consequence, a neuter substantive or pronoun undergoes no change, no reduction of dynamism, when used as the object of a verb, i.e. as conditioned by or in some way undergoing the event. Assuming this to be a valid explanation for that general phenomenon, it can be applied to neuter it to explain why it differs from he, she, and they in having no morphological indication of different case functions, relying rather on position in the sentence to express them. We can also see why it resembles you in this respect: both pronouns, the former because of its gender, the latter because of its dependent position in the speaking relationship, lack a certain dynamism. There is nothing to characterize the cardinal person of it and you for a specific syntactic role, support or import. Thus, in the same way as for demonstrative pronouns, possessives, and substantives, case is represented within the makeup of these pronouns as a potential to be actualized during the act of expression when the

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interplay of syntax requires them to assume a function and express it through their position in the sentence.

He, Him; She, Her Each of these pronouns expresses its gender, its number, and its case. Clearly their notional import involves not only the third person characterizing their cardinal person during ideogenesis, but also those three grammatical categories configuring it during their morphogenesis. Being animate and singular, they are further configured for a subgender, feminine or masculine, and in this they resemble I, which as we have seen is subgendered according to the speaker. Compared with they, these pronouns are more limited in two respects: their range of representing a support is restricted to entities perceived as animate, whereas they can represent a support for entities perceived as either animate or inanimate; and in number they are restricted to entities perceived as single, whereas they can depict a set of entities, however many – even one, as we shall see. From these observable facts we can infer that the cardinal person of he, him, she, and her is characterized by third person as outside the speaking relationship and also as both bounded and continuate (single) in space, a combination giving rise to animate gender with one or the other of its subgenders. Thus these pronouns provide a spatial support for entities represented as not participating in the speaking relationship, yet, being animate, capable of participating in it. In this respect, the discussion below brings out that she and he are opposed to inanimate it, which represents a support for entities without that capacity. Since she and he are so frequently considered to “refer to an antecedent,” it is worth recalling here the point made above for all pronouns. Thanks to its cardinal person, a pronoun refers to a space in the speaker’s intended message. When that space has been represented by a preceding noun phrase, this involves coreference and gives rise to an expressive effect of “anaphora,” whereas when it is represented by a later noun phrase it gives rise to an effect of “cataphora.” These “endophoric” effects are contrasted with “exophoric” effects, which occur when there is no corresponding noun phrase. Viewing a pronoun from the point of view of the speaker representing space through cardinal person to form the word helps explain these expressive effects and avoids the complications involved

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in describing these effects by adopting a purely syntactic approach, the point of view of a listener.93 The important category for us at this point is gender. It is tempting to speak of “personal gender” in English because it is almost always manifested by these two pronouns referring, or coreferring, to the space occupied by beings in the intended message perceived as human persons. To avoid confusion between the two senses of “person,” the existential or ‘human being’ sense and the grammatical or ‘spatial support’ sense, and to include uses of she and he to (co)refer to non-humans, the traditional expression “animate gender” has been adopted here and opposed to inanimate gender, in spite of the fact that inanimate it is usually used in coreferring to animals other than humans when their sex is unknown or not pertinent. As I have maintained in discussing the noun phrase,94 gender as a grammatical formative of the substantive arises as a consequence of the way its lexeme is actualized. A substantive’s lexeme represents the nature of its designatum as perceived by the speaker, and so its range of representation (its extension) includes any entity perceived as having that nature. However, lexemes representing human beings raise a problem. Most of them do not represent a salient feature of their nature: they depict humans as sexed beings but do not indicate which sex. Thus although the lexemes of queen and brother, doctor and cousin are all categorized grammatically as animate in gender, only the former two through their lexemes (opposed to king and sister respectively) make the subgender explicit. The latter two are formed as epicenes, and so when used to depict a particular individual (my doctor told me …), they express animate gender but do not express the individual’s subgender, even though the speaker may be quite aware of it. One effect of coreference by means of he or she is to make this subcategorization explicit. This view of gender can be brought out by usage in referring to animals. In the experience of cognoscenti – a game keeper, someone breeding animals, etc. – the sex of a particular animal is often a salient feature of its nature, and so we find those speakers often using the subgender pronouns in coreference, as in speaking of a human, to represent this as a natural trait (but without any of the special personifying effects to be examined in a moment). In the experience of ordinary speakers, on the other hand, an animal’s sex is not generally a salient trait of its nature. As a consequence, when grammaticizing lexemes such as dog or eagle, most speakers have no

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need to provide for subcategorizing beings of the same species, so they configure the lexeme as inanimate in gender, and the inanimate pronoun is used in coreference. The situation is often different for the owner of a pet. The use of she or he may be based on an awareness of the animal’s sex, but not necessarily so. She may be used to speak of a cat regardless of its sex, or even of a stray cat whose sex is not known. In such cases, some emotional link with the animal is generally prominent, an expressive effect of endearment or empathy, which may even involve personification, as when someone addresses an animal as you: It’s a cat! She looks hungry. Poor little pussy cat, you need something to eat.

There is no need to assume that she recategorizes the lexeme cat as animate here (or even as a human!) since a pronoun cannot represent the nature of its referent, only the space it occupies. In the second sentence, she corefers, refers a second time, to the speaker’s experience, this time with a prominent emotional reaction evoked by the feminine pronoun. That is, between the first sentence identifying the referent and the second sentence referring to it again, the speaker has had time to react. (You in the third sentence, representing the cat within the speaking relationship at least to the extent of understanding what is said, is common with pets.) This sort of use may extend to animals such as moles and insects that are not seen as pets but that momentarily evoke a certain emotional reaction on the part of the speaker, as in the following spoken by someone trying to trap a wasp in the kitchen: There he goes! He’s on the window … Got ’im!

Even more: we find uses of the subgender pronouns (co)referring to ships (“the classic case”),95 cars, trains, and even smaller objects. Quite obviously, in such cases there is no suggestion of subcategorization for sex, a fact that raises the question of what enables the pronoun to bring out momentary reactions like these. Granted the type of expressive effect resulting from such uses, they appear to be the outcome of the speaker seeing the referent in a new light, or at least in a special way. They indicate “a somewhat greater degree of interest in or empathy with the referent than does

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it.”96 As Wales points out, “Gender is in the mind’s eye of the beholder,”97 in the sense that it is the impressions arising in the speaker’s intended message that condition the opting for inanimate or animate gender in such uses of pronouns. This suggests that the ‘animate’ pronoun is called on to set the referent off, momentarily at least, from other such animals or objects. That is, for the needs of discourse in a given situation, he and she exploit their capacity to subcategorize in order to put the referent in a class by itself. The result is to indicate that this particular entity, as compared with others of the same nature, is different or special, thus giving rise to expressive effects of particular interest, empathy, etc., and in cases like the wasp example, an effect of challenge. This view of he and she, whereby they categorize their referent as animate and subcategorize it, setting it apart from others, does not of course apply to it, which simply categorizes its referent as inanimate with no subgenders. As a consequence, when used in coreference to a human, it has a “dehumanising connotation” with an effect of “reification.”98 While this often results in an expression of contempt, it is also used to refer to an adult in an expression of mock affection, of babying. In the following examples, it (referring to an adult, the speaker’s husband) illustrates these very different expressive effects: While you’re rushing around doing things I’ll be, you know, alone until it reappears.99 Poor Frank! Was all the beef gone? Did it get nothing but bread and cheese and gingerbeer?100

It can also be used to refer to an infant but with none of these emotional overtones, as in: The infant’s acquisition of language is a unique event … The infant has little else to do … And it is not just learning a language – it is learning the basis of all its future activities, the means by which it is going to learn almost everything else.101

Referring to a human being in this way would seem to arise because the infant is viewed as “too small to understand.”102 That is, having yet to develop its human potential, it may simply be viewed as excluded from the speaking relationship,103 whereas in

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the preceding two examples an adult is momentarily represented as excluded out of contempt or affection. The above examples are enough to indicate the diversity of expressive effect to which the same grammatical means can contribute. It seems that something in common with impressions evoked by humans is enough for using she or he in these contexts, and some impression comparable to the inanimate is a reason for using it. Quite obviously, the substantive itself and other factors in the context and situation contribute to the particular effect of a given example. It remains that the result is a more or less “dehumanising” effect in the case of it referring to adult humans, and an effect of “greater interest or empathy” in the case of he and she referring to objects or (often) animals. This can provide a basis for examining “prop” uses such as: How’s she going? (life in general) She’s blowing hard. (weather)

To propose that weather uses like this pose “a theoretical challenge” because they “do not have reference at all”104 does not take into account the role of cardinal person and the subcategorizing effect of animate gender. The same could be said of uses for something of common interest at the moment: Dug himself in, has he? (dentist with reference to a molar that

won’t come out) Everybody take pardners and whoop her up. I think we’ve pulled her out. (politician just after a close election)

In expressive effect, these resemble coreference uses where the referent has already been identified by the substantive and the pronoun expresses a reaction to it in coreference. Here, however, there is no coreference. Rather, as was seen above in discussing it, the referent is already present, either as a common parameter in “prop” uses or as something both speaker and hearer are already focused on, so that the animate pronoun in referring to it brings in its subcategorizing effect of something special, in a category by itself. On the other hand, he or she do not appear to occur as alternatives to the use of it in anticipatory uses (It was a great pleasure to …). This is quite understandable in light of what was maintained above, namely that

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what occupies the space represented by anticipatory it is something expressed by the rest of the sentence and not something already evoked by a previous substantive (the cat) or something general (life) or something focused on in the situation (the tooth). Reactions of interest, empathy, and the like can only arise with something one already has in mind. This necessarily incomplete survey of gender usage105 will suffice to bring out the hypothesis linking gender to ordinal person: although all third-person pronouns refer to non-participants in the speaking relationship, in ordinary usage the animate pronouns she and he refer to possible participants whereas it does not. As Wales points out for “pronoun-switching,”106 there is a need for further investigation here to explore such diversity adequately, particularly in the light of gender subcategorizing applied to a particular object, and the personifying effect with most any entity.107 The distinction between he and she in such uses also calls for further study, to bring out the notional elements characterizing the cardinal person of each one. As for the representational range of she and he, the question is whether they can represent a space wider than that occupied by a single being. Wales considers that he and she have only “specific exophoric reference,” whereas it can have “generalized” reference as well.108 In proverbs such as: He who hesitates is lost.

the pronoun does appear to have a fairly wide extensity, but this use “followed by a relative clause belongs to a literary and somewhat archaic style,”109 current English preferring anyone or those in such uses. The historical development implied here may well indicate that the pronoun’s range of representation has become less extensive, that it can no longer provide a support for potential referents. On the other hand, in an example such as: Ever since he found a need to communicate, man has been the ‘speaking animal’.

Quirk et al. consider the use of the pronoun to be “generic” because it is in “coreference with a singular generic noun phrase.”110 While man is used here in its widest extensity, the basis for assuming that this actualization of the lexeme is paralleled by a similar

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actualization of the epicene pronoun is not clear. Similarly for an example such as: Science affects the average man and woman in two ways already. He or she benefits by its applications, driving in a car or …111

he and she corefer to the space represented by the fairly wide extensity of their substantive, but what indicates that they represent it as ‘parti-generic’ the way the article does, and not as the space occupied by an unspecified individual? The following example of it raises the same question: A. Do you like caviar? B. I’ve never tasted it.

Quirk et al. consider this an example of “generic” it because caviar is used in a general sense.112 Although one can like something in general, it is not obvious that one can taste something in general. The import of the pronoun here appears to be much the same as in A. Do you like Venice? B. I’ve never visited it.

Furthermore, if, as I have argued, the cardinal person of a pronoun represents a space in the speaker’s intended message and not what occupies it, then he, she, and it in these examples corefer to the space occupied by the entity referred to by the substantive, regardless of whether that entity is represented by the substantive as generic, parti-generic, or concrete. That is, the pronoun represents the spatial support of the substantive’s referent but not its extensity, its relation to the lexeme’s range of representation (extension). These considerations suggest that the cardinal person of the three pronouns is actualized as a space to corefer to the place occupied by the referent of a lexeme or some other notional input. Like I, he and she are restricted to representing a bounded space, and this would include he in its traditional epicene use, which, as we shall see below in the discussion of gender, involves a duality not reduced to one of its terms. It, on the other hand, is not restricted to a bounded space, but can also represent an unbounded space that can extend to include the space occupied by the intended message (what Wales calls “generalized exophora”),113 as seen above in “ambient” uses. For all three pronouns, their cardinal person predetermines their

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configuration by the system of number as ‘singular,’ or better, ‘continuate’ (to include it representing an unbounded space). This limitation to an undivided, single support space appears to be the reason why these pronouns are not used as determiners. For entities in the intended message perceived as having a divided or multiple support space outside the speaking relationship, the system of pronouns provides they.

They, Them Like the three pronouns just discussed, the cardinal person of they is characterized by third person and so situates its referent outside the speaking relationship. On the other hand, they is found coreferring to the space occupied by any sort of entities, things, or people. This suggests that its cardinal person is not characterized with regard to possible participation in the speaking relationship and so does not predetermine its gender. That is to say, the gender of they is not predetermined by a characterization of its cardinal person but is configured in morphogenesis to support the particular set of entities occupying the space to which it corefers. This also applies to uses other than in coreference, such as: They say she has left town.

Here the speaker, with a vague set of people in mind, actualizes they as animate, but the listener must work back from the predicate, and particularly say (only humans say), to give the pronoun its gender in order to make out the sense expressed. On the other hand, in a sentence such as: They are too expensive.

without some coreference or gesture, one cannot determine if the pronoun is animate (coreferring to professional guides, for example) or inanimate (coreferring to a set of shirts on sale). Possible ambiguity like this, or contextual limitation to one gender as in the former example, indicates that they does represent and express a gender even though this may be so obvious as to pass unnoticed in most uses. They is ‘plural’ because it expresses a multiplicity of entities as members of a set, which may be clearly defined or left vague (as in

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the say example). More precisely, the cardinal person of they is characterized by the abstract notional import of the pronoun as representing a multiple or divided space, a space generally occupied by a set of entities, and in this respect contrasts with the ‘singular’ pronouns, which, as we have seen, represent a continuate, undivided space. For this reason they is not found in coreference with an ‘unbounded’ lexeme such as oxygen or nitrogen unless it is opposed to another such lexeme, therefore calling for a multiple support space, as in: They are both elements.

They is also found coreferring to a single person, as in: Someone called while you were out. They said they would call back.

This use is often considered a means of leaving the subgender undetermined, whether it is known by the speaker, as here, or unknown, as in: If anyone finds a stray dog, they are asked to call …

Here it seems that the pronoun’s gender is actualized to the point of representing ‘animate’ while leaving in abeyance the subcategorization as masculine or feminine required by the representation of space occupied by a single person. That is, numberwise, they is reduced to calling to mind the double possibility but is incapable of actualizing one or the other. The following is an example of this ‘one or the other’ reading which excludes any possibility of the usual ‘plural’ interpretation of they: If your identical twin was sent off into space on a rocket ship fast enough and for long enough, then they would age more slowly than you on Earth. On their return, they might find you to be elderly when they are still a sprightly youth.114

This use, found only to represent a particular human, is to be compared with the use of you and we to refer to a single person. For different reasons, all three pronouns appear to have a binary spatial support; you like they appears to be epicene, leaving the subgender

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undetermined, whereas authorial we depicts the writer in a role involving the reader. In each case, there is a suggestion of multiplicity calling for configuring them grammatically as ‘plural.’ At the other extreme of the cline or gradient constituting its representational range, they can represent the space occupied by the number of entities in an unlimited set, as in: Horses are beautiful animals. They …

Here one can imagine as many as one wishes, the sense being all the entities belonging to the species, i.e. having the nature depicted by the lexeme horse. Between these two extremes, they can depict any number, determined or undetermined, as in the first two examples in this section. Contrasting extensities of they in this way helps bring out what is involved in characterizing its spatial support as multiple: whether the set of entities is bounded or unbounded, it is configured by means of grammatical number as ‘discontinuate.’ For they, as for me, us, her, and him, case is determined during its morphogenesis, they being formed for support case, them for import case. What is involved in representing the support case enabling the pronoun to function as grammatical subject, as opposed to the import case enabling it to function as object, etc., has not yet been discerned for any of these pronouns. The difficulty encountered here appears to arise from the nature of case as opposed to the other two grammatical formatives: whereas gender and number are means of representing different aspects of something in the intended message, case is a means of representing a function in the sentence, the syntactic capacity to relate to another part of the sentence. This is probably the reason why case in the substantive, and in you and it, is not determined until the moment of discourse when the word takes its place as a syntactic unit in the projected sentence115 – at least this is what the sign usually indicating case (position in the sentence) suggests. Finally, the use of them as a determiner (them boys) is usually considered substandard, although it is “the preferred form of young urban speakers in Britain (except Glasgow).”116 As compared with “standard those,” them “can hardly be called a ‘personal pronoun’” in this use.117 However, the fact that them, like us and you, has a variable extensity appears to be what enables all three to assume the function of determiner. To explain why the demonstrative is preferred

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here by most speakers would call for a comparison of the two systems of pronoun, a question that cannot be explored here. This finishes our rapid survey of usage of the twelve personal pronouns. Before turning to more general questions, however, another pronoun should be mentioned, since it poses a problem for anyone who considers that these pronouns form a system.

One – A “New Personal Pronoun”? Quirk et al. list three distinct uses of one, the third of which is of ­interest to us here:118 – numerical: one of the boys/pens – substitute: Yes, I’d like a drink, but just a small one. (= a small drink) – generic: I like to dress nicely. It gives one confidence. Contrasting their different morphological possibilities – numerical one; substitute one/ones; generic one/one’s/oneself – these scholars observe that generic one, traditionally considered an indefinite pronoun, “is often replaced colloquially by you.” For Kruisinga, one is “an indefinite personal pronoun,” though he does not include it in his chart of personal pronouns. For Bolinger it is “an impersonal personal pronoun.” Since it is “a variant of you and I” in certain uses, Wales considers that “one can now be seen as a new personal pronoun” and lists it with them. Huddleston and Pullum provide even clearer evidence for this when they point out that “reflexives are not found outside the personal pronoun system.”119 This suggests that it is ordinal person as found in personal pronouns that provides the notional input characterizing cardinal person in reflexive pronouns such as oneself. They also point out that one is found as the subject of interrogative tags, as in: One can’t be too careful in these matters, can one?

and that this is “a distinctive property of personal pronouns.” As a consequence, Huddleston and Pullum consider that generic or indefinite one “belongs with the personal pronouns,” though they do not list it with them.120

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From the systemic point of view adopted here, these observations, both morphological and functional, cannot be ignored, because they point to the system underlying the pronoun. They can be supplemented by the meaning the pronoun expresses. In her chart of pronouns with “exophoric reference,” Wales attributes three senses to one: generic, indefinite, and specific.121 The specific sense is a “shifted use” where “one can clearly be replaced by I,” as she remarks in her discussion of usage,122 and so can be “an ideal replacement for ‘royal we,’” as when Prince Charles said: It was a sad moment leaving one’s family on the tarmac waving one goodbye.

Such uses involve “generalizations … of a very low order,” and are in fact “barely generalizations, if at all.” Expressing an indefinite sense, one offers an equivalent of the passive by providing “a convenient agent, but … without the ‘personal’ or ‘familiar’ modulation” expressed by we or you, as in: What one calls social conscience is often …

Similarly, in generic uses one co-occurs with you (and we): I don’t feel that one can ever be a therapist to somebody that you are so closely involved with emotionally.

Wales considers these uses to form a “continuum,”123 apparently based on the degree of generalization involved, and so in every use the sense – generic, indefinite, or specific (barely generalized) – “must be inferred in interpretation every time” from context and situation by listeners or readers. Being aware of the intended message, a speaker of course already knows the “ostensible or ‘literal’ reference” and actualizes the pronoun’s cardinal person with the appropriate extensity to represent the degree of generalization this intended referent calls for. The barely generalized use implying the speaker is a possibility exploited by relatively few speakers. Although Huddleston and Pullum point out that “[f]or most speakers one is used … in talking about people generally rather than in reference to a single individual,” it does seem more common when used to imply the addressee.124 If we take their above example:

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One can’t be too careful in these matters, can one?

as an admonishment with a minimal generalization including speaker and addressee, the implication would be apparent that it is the addressee the speaker has in mind. Thanks to the situation, it remains that even here one does not have “particular reference to” a single person but merely implies it, as Quirk et al. suggest for their dress example given above.125 On the other hand, the oe d (s.v. “one,” sense 5) considers one in: He died in 1859, leaving the property in question to one Ann Duncan.

to be the indefinite pronoun “defined by a substantive in apposition,” a use where it does refer to a single person, a person to be identified. It remains to be seen whether further observation of the different extensities expressed by one confirms that this use involves “particular reference” to a single, albeit indefinite, individual – that is, the minimal extensity of its cardinal person. If so, its range of representation is greater than that of she or he, whose use in proverbs as seen above (He who hesitates is lost) is considered archaic. In this respect, one is more like it, but of course it is inanimate, whereas one is restricted to humans. Although it may appear to imply an undefined group of people, unlike substitute one(s), indefinite one cannot be configured as ‘plural,’ as ‘discontinuate,’ because its very meaning ‘one’ characterizes its cardinal person as a single bounded spatial support. That is, its abstract notional import appears to characterize its cardinal person in such a way as to predetermine its configuration for gender as ‘animate’ (animate entities cannot have an unbounded spatial support), and its configuration for number as ‘continuate’ (including ‘singular’?) – as ‘indefinite human.’ Furthermore, its ordinal person represents that more or less generalized individual as beyond the speaking relationship, but nothing in one indicates where in the Beyond-Self the individual is situated. Unlike the other third-person pronouns, one is not used to corefer. Since its place in space is left undetermined, in its continuum of actualized extensities one can suggest any individual in the widest extensity, or in narrower extensities, or in the narrowest, giving the generic, indefinite, and individual senses observed in discourse. Thus the extensities made possible by one all express a space for an unidentified individual,

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who can find a place everywhere within the space represented. This explains why one is considered an indefinite pronoun, and in this respect resembles a, the indefinite article. The upshot of these observations is that one does appear to be part of the system of the personal pronouns. Its cardinal person is characterized by a ‘human’ trait, entailing a bounded space, and by third person, situating it outside the speaking relationship. It is therefore configured by gender as ‘animate’ and by number as ‘continuate,’ but since it brings in no indication of its place in the Beyond-Self, it can be anywhere in the space implied by the act of speech. Thus one differs from all the other third-person pronouns: he and she are configured by subgender as ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine,’ and they situate their referent in space (except in archaic proverbs); it is configured as ‘inanimate’ and ‘continuate, singular’ since it can represent either an unbounded or a bounded space which it situates in the Beyond-Self; they can be configured as ‘inanimate’ or ‘animate’ in gender and only as ‘discontinuate’ in number, but in uses such as They say it may rain, it evokes no definite referent. In short, one shares a number of traits (one’s, oneself) with the other pronouns, yet is distinct from them all in that, being ‘indefinite,’ it does not corefer. It remains, however, that until its relation with “substitute” one, which Huddleston and Pullum consider “a count noun,”126 has been clarified and its position in relation to the other pronouns in the system has been worked out, its status as a personal pronoun can only be considered a hypothesis yet to be verified. This completes our summary of usage. It has brought out that gender is a crucial formative element of the personal pronouns. Since it is more readily observable here than elsewhere in English, we will pause to consider the question of gender in the wider context of its manifestations outside these pronouns, before turning to the system underlying the personal pronouns themselves. gender

Because there is no longer agreement of adjectives in English, manifestations of grammatical gender are found mainly in pronouns. Interrogatives who and whom contrast with what “as personal vs nonpersonal,” and relatives who and which manifest the same contrast.127 Interrogative whose is “personal,” but as a relative pronoun it can corefer to either human persons or non-human entities. Indefinite

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pronouns such as someone/something, nobody/nothing also manifest this duality of gender, animate and inanimate in the terminology adopted here. Where these interrogatives, relatives, and indefinites distinguish clearly between two types of referent by means of gender, the personal pronouns she and he go further in distinguishing a subclass, female or male, within the class of human beings. That is, they characterize their cardinal person both for animate gender, as opposed to it, and for feminine or masculine subgender. Since this is the only grammatical manifestation of subgender in English, it is important to examine these three pronouns not only for their respective places in the system of pronouns but also as a means of getting a more complete view of gender as a category of representation in English. As I have proposed elsewhere,128 gender and subgender in the substantive can be discerned in ordinary uses through the coreference of a pronoun. As a permanent potential in tongue the lexeme “has neither gender nor number,”129 which is to say that it has no grammatical strings attached. Because of their makeup the majority of lexemes, like chair and doctor, show no variation between inanimate and animate genders in usage, but there are lexemes such as guide (book, person) and speaker (person, loudspeaker), and even boy (as in the example discussed previously), that do manifest gender variation. This indicates that any lexeme actualized to represent something in the intended message as a substantive includes a trait calling for a particular configuration by the “duality of representation”130 provided by the system of gender. That is, when actualized, the lexeme always characterizes the substantive’s cardinal person with a trait representing something in the nature of the experiential entity that predetermines its grammatical categorization for gender. Thus gender, unlike number, offers the possibility of distinguishing different types of beings represented by the same lexeme. Moreover, lexemes such as teacher and doctor, or guide and speaker when configured by animate gender, entail a further dual possibility of representation to configure them for subgender, either feminine or masculine, a possibility exploited when referring to a known individual. Something similar can be observed in cognoscenti usage when coreferring to animals: through their specialized experience, certain speakers are led to include either maleness or femaleness as part of the nature of a given animal. That is, speakers represent their experiential distinction between sexes by depicting an animal

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as belonging to one or the other “subspecies” of the species, and so corefer to it with either he or she. As with humans, this usage manifests what is made possible by animate gender: a duality of representation distinguishing two subgenders as two natural types within the same species or nature of entity. “In nonexpert contexts there is no need to make a gender distinction” of this sort with animals, as Quirk et al. point out, and so the inanimate pronoun it is normal for coreference. As seen above, however, in lay usage we do find she and he coreferring to animals when people have “a special concern” for a pet or domesticated animal.131 As compared with it, animate she or he “indicates a somewhat greater degree of interest in or empathy with the referent,” just as the animate relative pronoun in a dog who was licking my face gives the effect of more “personal interest and involvement” when compared with which.132 The same sort of expressive effect is also observed with “inanimate entities, such as ships, towards which we have an intense and close personal relationship.”133 Expressive effects such as these are quite different from those arising in cognoscenti usage with animals or in ordinary coreference to a human. This difference of effect appears to stem from the fact that in nonexpert usage the animate pronoun distinguishes not one type or “subspecies” from another but a particular dog, ship, etc. from all others because of the speaker’s special interest, empathy, or relationship to it at that moment. The evoking of a personal relationship may suggest a sort of personification of the referent, as though the speaker attributed some humanizing trait(s) to that animal or object making it distinct from others of the same kind, a distinction ordinarily accorded to any being recognized as a human person.134 Distinguishing between she and he in their personifying uses with non-humans is a difficult problem calling for further study because of the particularly subtle expressive effects they can give rise to. Wales suggests that, among other “devices,” it is manifested by “potentiality for the referent to be addressed by you … the assignment of the faculty of speech.”135 By the very fact of expressing a personal relationship between speaker and referent, these uses may be influenced by the interests, age, sex, momentary mood, etc. of the speaker. This makes she and he highly expressive instruments for the speaker but correspondingly difficult words to analyze for the grammarian/linguist, whose task is to determine to what extent and in what respect the referent is personified in the eyes of the speaker.

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Do she and he personalize an object or animal to the point of making it a possible participant in the speaking relationship, as in addressing it by you? Or, as in cognoscenti usage of she and he with animals, is there no implication of possible participation in the speech act because the designatum is not by nature a languaged being? An expressive effect just the opposite of personification may arise when the inanimate pronoun is used to designate a human adult: as we saw above, it has an effect of “dehumanizing” or “reifying,” depersonalizing someone, excluding a human from personhood. When referring to an infant as yet incapable of participating in discourse, or treating an adult affectionately as an infant, it has no such deprecating effect. The difference of effect between these two uses of it appears to be between treating a human as an object and so without language, or as a person just acquiring language, as “too small to understand what is being said to it.”136 The parents of an infant, of course, would use he or she because of their intimate relation, which normally involves participating in a sort of discourse with the baby. These observations seem to indicate that as a third-person pronoun it represents its designatum not merely as outside the speech act but, unlike she and he, as excluded from participating in it. Thus the system of gender permits a duality of representation in ordinary usage, a means of subdividing beings (even those designated by the same lexeme, such as guide) into two genders, inanimate and animate. Furthermore, animate gender has the recursive capacity to distinguish animate beings of the same nature or class into two subgenders, masculine and feminine. This same subdividing capacity also appears to be operative in personification usage. The difference in this latter type of usage is that the capacity of gender distinguishes just one individual entity from all others of the same nature to better reflect the speaker’s impressions of that individual at that moment. Indeed, as Siemund argues, “pronominal gender in English crucially depends on the degree of individuation of the entities referred to.”137 Insofar as the grammatical category is concerned, the point is that, whether distinguishing between two subclasses, or between one individual and others of its class, the same mechanism is apparently at work. That is, our discussion appears to have provided a first glimpse of the how the system of gender operates in these (de)personifying uses: as a mechanism subdividing a lexeme’s representational range to set an individual entity off from others within that range.

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Guillaume anticipated this explanation when he pointed out that the source of true gender, as in English,138 is “unique, consisting in the very nature of the being considered.” That is, speaking of the animate, “gender is always sexual; it reflects a vitalistic, social conception.” As a consequence, this “true gender is a state of singular number … What created masculine and feminine is the need to draw the singular from an antonymous dual. What created the neuter is the need to draw the singular from a homonymous dual.”139 More explicitly, the operation of representing what I have called subgender “consists in abstracting, withdrawing from a dual representing a symbiosis of two different beings one of its constituents, which then becomes a singular with a gender, since it is itself and not the other.” This helps explain the “close connections between gender and number” as grammatical categories.140 A clear illustration of homonymous vs. antonymous duals arose in our discussion of cognoscenti usage above. As a particular speaker’s experience of a given animal increases, its sex becomes a salient element of its nature. For that speaker, this entails configuring the lexeme for the appropriate subgender to represent a single animal, and as a consequence using the appropriate pronoun, he or she, in coreference. In this type of use, as in referring to humans, the singular is drawn from a dual possibility based on sex, a trait of nature, and so these pronouns evoke none of the personification effects that we observed above when, in other uses, he and she corefer to non-humans. Personifying uses are also based on an antonymous dual, but the opposition is between one individual momentarily seen as exceptional as compared with all others of the same nature, and not between two permanent traits. Thus the various uses of he and she can all be understood as arising from the basic mechanism of drawing a singular from the dual possibility offered by animate gender. In grammars gender is often treated as a distinction between “personal vs. non-personal,” i.e. between human and non-human, with a recognition of the subgenders of she and he. While this seems adequate to describe usage of who vs. what, anyone vs. anything, etc., as well as the ordinary uses of she, he, and it, it cannot do justice to the uses of she and he to (co)refer to non-humans. The more complex view of gender presented here emerges from trying to take into account she, he, and it, and even you, used outside their ordinary uses in order to explain the expressive effects they give rise to. Like any

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such attempt to get a view of the system underlying usage, this calls for further observation of, and reflection on, real uses to confirm, modify, or disprove it. case

Although case, the third configuring form in substantives and pronouns, has been mentioned in passing, there has been little attempt to integrate it into discussion on the systemic level. This may seem surprising in view of the fact that the majority of the personal pronouns have different forms for support case (I, we, he, she, they) and import case (me, us, him, her, them). It remains, however, that you, one, and it signify their case syntactically, by their position in the sentence, but not morphologically. That is, like substantives and other pronouns,141 they offer both cases as possibilities, one or the other being actualized during the act of expression when the syntactic relations of the sentence are being realized. This suggests that case configures a word’s spatial support, but not, like gender and number, to conform it to the place occupied by its referent in the intended message. Rather, case configures a word’s support to conform it to the place it is to occupy in the projected sentence so that it can relate to other sentence components and thus form the sentence to express what has been represented. That is, outside of the five casesensitive personal pronouns, there is no indication that the system of case, with its double potential for import and support functions, delivers one or the other of its possibilities during the forming of a substantive or pronoun; rather, it seems to do so at a later moment in the constructing of the sentence. This is most apparent for substantives, where it is the noun phrase and not the substantive itself that exercises the role of support or import,142 but even here the underlying system has yet to be discerned. It remains that these five pronouns do appear to determine case within the word, as they did in Old English. In his lengthy discussion of the question, Jespersen observes the “tendency to let the oblique (object) case prevail over the nominative (subject) case”143 – a tendency perhaps most clearly manifested in English by you prevailing over ye. His observation indicates the direction and result, but not the cause of this change. There are uses, however, where “the nominative carries the day”: besides who, we find uses such as It made Dad and I laugh144 and between you and I from Early Modern English to the

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present. As mentioned above, it will probably require a careful analysis of the coordinating conjunction involved in these uses to understand why (in our terminology) the support pronoun I is used rather than the traditional import pronoun me, an analysis that may well bring out the notional elements distinguishing the two cases and so further our understanding of the system of case itself. In short, an analysis of case as an operative system has yet to be undertaken. t h e s p e a k i n g r e l at i o n s h i p

Our discussion of the personal pronouns has brought out the dividing line in their underlying system. I, we, and you refer their support space to a relatively restricted area within our universe of experience, the speaking relationship. Since in any act of speech this relationship is present, at least implicitly, locating their cardinal person in space and identifying who or what occupies it seldom poses a problem for the listener. A third-person pronoun can refer its support to a place anywhere else within the speaker’s universe of experience. Except for indefinite pronouns, this usually poses the problem of locating that space and of identifying who or what occupies it, whence the discussion of pronouns in various uses to discern how the speaker uses different contextual means and also relies on elements in the situation of discourse to indicate to listeners or readers what the pronoun refers to. Every act of language involving grammatical person situates what is being talked about either inside or outside the speaking relationship. This presupposes that anything we talk about, anything we want to refer to, any intended designatum,145 occupies a place in space, a space divided between a limited area – that defined by the speakeraddressee link, “the small Man/Man confrontation” – and all the rest of that unlimited expanse containing our ongoing experience of the universe around and within us – “the great Universe/Man confrontation,” as Guillaume graphically described it.146 The speaker calls on a personal pronoun to represent the intended designatum as situated in one or the other of these areas in such a way that it can be localized therein for the needs of discourse. That is, cardinal person, here as elsewhere, represents the space occupied by the intended designatum, and ordinal person characterizes the space containing it as either inside or outside the speaking relationship.

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The abstract notional import of each pronoun characterizes its cardinal person for its range of representation (extension), wide or narrow, and with indications for its configuration by gender, number, and (for some) case. Thus for I and me, representing the speaker’s self, each characterizes its cardinal person by situating its intended designatum as an actual participant within the speaking relationship, as its instigator, thus localizing it at the inception of that relationship. This notional import gives each pronoun a minimal range of representation, a gender (animate), and a number (singular), and actualizes its case, either support or import. You also situates its intended designatum within the speaking relationship, thereby determining its gender as animate. Because it can be either singular or plural, including potential addressees, however, its range of representation and number is a potential to be actualized for each use, and this often requires other elements in the discourse to indicate how far the speaker has extended its cardinal person. The synthetic case of you is also actualized in usage and expressed by position in the sentence. We and us also situate their intended designata inside the speaking relationship, characterizing them for animate gender and a range of representation to be actualized: outside of inclusive speaker + actual addressee(s) uses, some indication in the sentence or situation may be required in order to bring out how wide (or narrow) an extensity these pronouns represent, and thus how many potential speakers or addressees are being including in the speaking relationship. They also characterize the word for its syntactic case. The different extensities you and we express in usage are manifestations of a capacity for extension through space that is not found in I. This enables you and we/us (and them) to function as determiners representing the extensity of a substantive and situating its designatum within the speaking relationship. The remarkable thing about you and we/us is that even in their widest extensities they include only participants, actual or possible, therein. That is, the capacity to participate in a speaking relationship is found in all three pronouns, though actualized differently in each. This capacity obviously presupposes the possession of language and so is limited to humans, or to other beings personified in some way. This comes out most clearly when I or you designate a non-human being, thus attributing to it, through personification, the capacity to participate in that speech act. As these observations of first- and second-person pronouns

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indicate, besides being characterized for a role, a capacity to participate, in the speaking relationship, their cardinal person is characterized for extensity by each pronoun’s abstract notional content – always the same minimal extensity of one’s self in the case of I, and extensities varying to fit the intended message in the case of we and you. The third-person pronouns characterize their cardinal person as situated outside the speaking relationship, but in different ways. She and he represent their respective intended designata as not participating in the speech act, but usually as possible participants in it, because in the majority of uses they are called on to represent the space occupied by a being with language. When they (co)refer to a non-human entity, the personalizing effects may well arise from attributing to it the same possible-participant link. On the other hand, it in its ordinary uses and in coreferring to humans with its depersonalizing or infantilizing effect excludes its referents as possible participants in the speaking relationship. However, it remains that certain non-personalizing effects of he and she (as in ambient uses), as well as cognoscenti uses, suggest little more than the effect arising from the mechanism of gender, that of distinguishing one individual from the other in a dual unit. Thus whereas the inanimate pronoun it characterizes its cardinal person as the place of one entity distinguished from others only by the space it occupies, the two animate pronouns she and he characterize their cardinal person as the place of an entity distinct from others both spatially and by some other trait, usually sex. In all these uses, he and she characterize their cardinal person as a bounded, undivided space, thus predetermining its configuring for grammatical number as ‘singular.’ Like any other pronoun, they represent space as a support but not the entity supported in that space. They appear to have no variation in extensity, though the question remains open. One, on the other hand, can vary in extensity to provide the support space for the generalization of a human being, implying anything from the most general and vague group of humanity to the barely generalized group involved in the act of discourse, and even a single unidentified individual. It also varies in extensity to provide the support space of anything being talked about, from the whole intended message to some item in it. Finally, the cardinal person of they represents a divided space outside the speaking relationship, varying in extensity from a minimum space sufficient as a binary support for a single intended designatum

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to a maximum, unlimited space as support of any number of entities. They can be used to designate either humans or non-humans and gives no indication of a distinction for subgender. This would seem to suggest that, unlike the other pronouns, its cardinal person is not characterized to predetermine its gender. In one of its uses, however, they is limited to animate gender: when its intended designatum is a single, unspecified person, it represents the space occupied as dual, leaving both subgenders as possibilities. Since this use is not found with things, it does give a good indication that, like the other personal pronouns, they is configured for gender. A more careful examination of usage will perhaps throw further light on the question of gender here, where, as in the first- and second-person pronouns, gender is difficult to observe because of its low profile in discourse. ta k i n g s t o c k

Our survey of usage has been guided by the postulate that, like other words contributing to the construction of a sentence, the personal pronouns are formed by the binary process of ideogenesis followed by morphogenesis. It was also postulated that, since the personal pronouns are space words like substantives, cardinal person is one of their formative elements. Although it does not import a lexeme, each pronoun has its own abstract notional import, which, during ideogenesis, finds a support in, and thus characterizes, the space represented by its cardinal person. In its notional import, the most obvious trait characterizing the cardinal person of each pronoun is ordinal person with its extension, a representation of the space, within or beyond the speaking relationship, occupied by the pronoun’s intended designatum. Other notional traits, variable from one pronoun to another, may characterize the pronoun’s cardinal person to precondition how it is grammatically configured for gender, number, and case during its morphogenesis. That is, while all pronouns are configured by gender, number, and case, a pronoun’s particular gender (or subgender), number, or case may be either predetermined during its ideogenesis and so constant (like number and case for I or they), or left as a potential to be actualized depending on the intended designatum in a particular act of discourse (like number and case in you). To summarize for gender: the cardinal persons of I, we, and you are characterized by their notional content as participants in the

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speaking relationship and so are limited to being configured as animate in gender. Characterized by their notional import as not participating but in most uses as possible participants, one, she, and he are limited to being grammatically configured as animate in gender and the latter two for a specific subgender. It is characterized as excluded from participating and so is limited to being grammatically formed as inanimate in gender. The notional content of they characterizes its cardinal person as not participating in the speaking relationship, but does not characterize its participation as either possible or impossible, thus leaving its configuration for gender to be determined by the intended designatum during the act of speech. This gives a view of how the system of gender is exploited by the personal pronouns. In like fashion, the diverse abstract notional imports of the pronouns characterize their cardinal person differently for their extension, giving rise to different predeterminations for number: I, she, and he, with no variation in extensity, call for a ‘singular’ (bounded) configuration; it, with variable extensity, calls for a ‘continuate’ (unbounded) or ‘singular’ configuration; one, with variable extensity, calls for a ‘continuate’ configuration; we and they, variable in extensity, call for a ‘discontinuate’ (plural) configuration; you, variable in extensity, allows for either a ‘singular’ or a ‘plural’ configuration. This brings out what is common to these pronouns – cardinal person characterized by ordinal person – as well as what distinguishes them from one another – their abstract notional import. It may be thought that the discussion of ordinal person above, distinguishing between first, second, and third persons and laying out the consequences for grammatical configuration, suffices as a description of this system; but this does not indicate how the system operates. That is, we have yet to work out how the pronouns are positioned with regard to one another to constitute a system operating in such a way that it enables them to represent what is common to all while characterizing it differently, or to put it another way, we do not yet understand what enables the speaker to construct the appropriate pronoun instantaneously during an act of speech. By reflecting on how the abstract import of each pronoun resulting from its ideogenesis conditions its own grammatical formatting in morphogenesis, we can perhaps discern more clearly how they are related to one another in their system; but this takes us a further step away from the directly observable facts of usage and calls for an even more general framework.

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distinguishing self from beyond-self

As in other disciplines that try to probe beyond the observable in order to explain it, we will start with a possible way of looking at things, an intuition or hypothesis, to see if it throws light on, or is contradicted by, the data. Fortunately, other linguists have proposed a basic distinction that will provide our starting point. In 1942, Guillaume spoke of “the primordial fact of the separation of the Self from the Beyond-Self.”147 He was not the first to make this distinction. In 1911, Boas and Powell pointed out that “our three persons of the pronouns are based on the two concepts of self and notself.”148 In 1836, Humboldt proposed “that person-words must have been primary in every language … The first thing is naturally the personality of the speaker himself, who stands in continuous and direct contact with nature, and cannot possibly fail, even in language, to set over against the latter expression of his self.”149 If “nature” is interpreted here as the equivalent of “not-self” in Boas and “BeyondSelf”150 in Guillaume, all three linguists appear to be making the same distinction.151 Our postulate then is that, like any speaker, being aware of my own self entails my distinguishing it from my experience of whatever is not me – you (the addressee) and any other person or thing I can talk to or about. We will try to see what this basic Self vs. Beyond-Self opposition, postulated as an inescapable distinction for every speaker, implies for the system of pronouns. To my knowl­edge, Guillaume is the only linguist to develop this basic insight in exploring grammatical person. He goes so far as to claim that “the category of person proceeds from the separation of the Self from the Beyond-Self, an operation of thought indispensable for the creation of language itself.” Separating self from the beyond-self involves distinguishing the experience one has of one’s own existence from the experience one has of the existence of everything else. To arrive at this view of self, Guillaume speaks in terms of “a narrowing view … which, to define itself, gets rid of everything that is not strictly itself,” a process leaving only the “the narrow Self, the personal Self, the singular Self, with nothing identical to it.”152 This suggests that the self is what remains when one’s field of consciousness is narrowed down to focus on what cannot be left out, the experience of one’s self. Involved here is an operation of discrimination or particularization as suggested by the following

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field of consciousness

figure, where the vector depicts restricting the field of consciousness to its minimal scope, a space limited to that occupied by a person’s Self, depicted by S.

S

Guillaume contrasts this narrowing view with the view “in expansion” of the Beyond-Self, “a view which extends to everything which is not the Self … to the whole unlimited exterior” of the Self. The process involved here, just the opposite of that defining the Self, can begin only after the space occupied by the experience of the Self has been delimited. The Beyond-Self must be depicted beginning beyond S and may be expanded to cover all the rest of the field of consciousness, as in the following figure:

Beyond-Self

S

The Beyond-Self is unlimited because our experience of the universe can always be extended. To access this outside universe as observer, however, first involves delimiting within the field of consciousness the place one occupies as distinct from all the rest. That is,

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S

Beyond-Self

field of consciousness

to experience the Beyond-Self as such presupposes that the Self has already been distinguished. The following figure depicts the temporal relation between the two processes, depicted here by dotted vectors to indicate them as potentials, and the S indicates the distinction of Self from everything else in our universe of experience:

These figures, which do not appear in Guillaume’s text,153 are introduced here as an interpretation of the above descriptions he gives of the two processes involved in separating Self from BeyondSelf. He later called this type of twofold operation the radical binary tensor, and postulated that it depicted mental operations for structuring language in general. This helps us understand why he considered “the separation of the Self from the Beyond-Self, an operation of thought indispensable for the creation of language itself”: only the extreme of particularization opposed to its counterpart of generalization can give a constant for organizing one’s ever-changing experience, thus providing a necessary mental precondition permitting a human being to represent and to speak about something, about anything. To be noted here is that, in Guillaume’s view, human language itself is based on the prior exercise of a mental capacity enabling one to become conscious of one’s self. That is, from its inception language is a mental construct. Only when this pre-linguistic discrimination within our field of consciousness has been realized can the means of representing both it and our ongoing experience be instituted. In fact, a few years later, Guillaume remarked that,

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because it makes human language possible, “the relating of the Self to the Beyond-Self makes human civilization as a whole.”154 representing self and beyond-self

To understand how the experiential, i.e. pre-linguistic, distinction between self and beyond-self makes the creation of language possible, we can now explore how “the category of person proceeds from the separation of the Self from the Beyond-Self.” Guillaume describes this in the following cryptic passage: “It remains for the human person, which has been differentiated by ‘de-identifying’ itself from the Beyond-Self, to identify itself with regard to itself: this entails an incidence of person to itself. It is only then that the category of person is founded.”155 This calls for an attempt to make his thought more explicit. Once this “de-identifying” from the Beyond-Self (as described in the previous section) is accomplished, one has the experience of one’s self as a distinct existent. It can then be depicted linguistically by representing both the impressions one has of one’s own existence and the place it occupies,156 thus identifying represented Self “with regard to itself,” with regard to its own spatial support. That is, making the linguistic representation of a speaker’s own Self incident to the representation of its own place in space, distinct from the place of anything else in one’s field of consciousness at the moment, is the “incidence of person to itself.” This involves the referential incidence of the linguistically represented Self to the experiential entity it represents: one’s extra-linguistic experience of oneself. In other words, to find the way of depicting by means of language our awareness of being a unique entity separate from all other experiential entities, we must each acquire the capacity of representing both our distinctness and the place we occupy, thus enabling us to situate our Self through reference to the space underlying all our conscious experience. Once acquired, this capacity can be transferred to entities other than our Self. The transporting or transferring does not of course imply that it is the representation of Self in all its particularity for any speaker that is transferred to other entities, but rather the means of representing something, whatever its own particularity, as an entity, as a being occupying its own space. Moreover, “it suffices to make the unlimited Beyond-Self incident to itself for the notion of space to be

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instituted in the mind.”157 The expression “Beyond-Self incident to itself” can be understood as making the spatial representation of some entity incident, through reference, to the place that entity occupies in our experience of the Beyond-Self. Viewing reference spatially in this way entails contrasting the limited space of an entity with the unlimited space of the Beyond-Self, which, as Guillaume had remarked earlier, gives rise to “a spatialization of space through opposition to itself.” This view of space experienced as a non-finite extent, “immobile, continuate, indiscriminate,” peopled by finite spatial entities is what gives rise to the linguistic category called person.158 Such considerations lead Guillaume to pose, and answer, the basic question: “What is person? Person is the experience that the Self has of itself, transported more or less freely to the Beyond-Self.”159 The expression “more or less freely” may be an allusion to the fact that second person represents an entity in the Beyond-Self as a sort of other Self with its own space in the speaking relationship, and hence as a participant in it, whereas third person represents an entity with its own space in the Beyond-Self and included in the speech act not as a participant but only because it is spoken of. Thus postulating the constant awareness of self as unique in our experience permits Guillaume to describe grammatical person in very general terms. Once the Self has been experienced and represented as distinct from, but situated in, its own place in space, this same process of representing a space as distinct from what occupies it can be applied to anything else experienced beyond the speaker’s Self. Attempting in this way to follow the thread of Guillaume’s thought as he explores the consequences of his starting postulates is hazardous work because, as he remarked elsewhere, he sometimes proposes an insight without having sufficient data and arguments to support it, leaving it to subsequent observation and reflection to confirm or replace it.160 For the moment, we can point out that the above interpretation of his texts is based on his postulate that language is a means of representing and expressing our experience, and that it illustrates two principles he often recalled, namely that we can represent only by spatial means (as in spatializing time to represent it in the verb), and that we think by contrast, here opposing space to itself (opposing a finite space of an entity to the non-finite space containing it). Thus Guillaume’s development of the Self vs. BeyondSelf distinction in representation is here understood as basically a spatial dichotomy and as entailing the view that grammatical person,

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as found in both substantives and pronouns, is fundamentally a means of representing the space in any experiential entity by cardinal person to provide a spatial support for the substantive’s lexeme and for the pronoun’s abstract notional import. In what follows, we will continue to explore what light, if any, this very general view of person throws on the system of the personal pronouns. probing the system

Our summary examination of usage has brought out how cardinal person is characterized by each pronoun’s notional import for participant role and extension, predetermining thereby its ordinal person and its configuring by gender and number during its morphogenesis. (No attempt has been made to explore case, support vs. import, since this does not involve representation of the intended message but instead relates to what conditions syntax, as we have seen.) In light of these findings, it is time now to explore more general considerations in an attempt to discern how the relations between the pronouns group them into a coherent system. We saw above that Guillaume’s understanding of personal pronouns is based on a relationship between cardinal and ordinal persons, as mentioned in 1942 during a discussion of je, tu, and il in French, where he recognizes “the ordinal characterization of person” and an “objective person spoken about”161 common to all three. He developed this view several years later, in 1948, when he distinguished between “ordinal 3rd person” and “logical 3rd person”:162 “the whole basis of the personal system is cardinal person. Ordinal person is only a characterization of cardinal person … To have the system of [ordinal] person in a language, cardinal person is required to undergo a characterization arising from the act of language.”163 This clear indication that the system of ordinal person in tongue is based on cardinal person, the “person spoken about” diversely characterized by ordinal person during the forming of the word, is adopted here in an attempt to discern the system of the personal pronouns in English. Our starting hypothesis is that the same formative element found in every pronoun, cardinal person, represents the space occupied by its intended referent. Each pronoun brings in its own abstract notional import, making it incident to, and so characterizing, the

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support space represented by cardinal person. Thus a first-person pronoun characterizes its support space as that of the speaker (I) or as containing that of the speaker along with possible speakers (we); the second-person pronoun (you) characterizes its support space as that of the actual addressee(s) or as containing it/them along with possible addressees; third-person pronouns characterize their support space as outside the speaker/addressee relationship. This rephrasing of the commonplaces of grammars in more analytical terms brings out the speaking relationship as the basis of the system, and also indicates more clearly that each pronoun occupies its own position with regard to that relationship. As seen above, Guillaume defines person as “the experience that the Self has of itself, transported more or less freely to the BeyondSelf.” He continues: “It is this transporting that gives the order of the persons.”164 What is transferred to the Beyond-Self is the capacity to represent the space something occupies, separate from the entity that occupies it. That is, the capacity to represent space by means of cardinal person is transported from the Self to the Beyond-Self, giving “the order of the persons.” Because this transporting starts from the Self, the instigator of the act of speech, I, the pronoun representing Self in its own space as what is spoken of, is appropriately called “first” person. The very act of speech establishes a speaking relationship that brings the addressee(s) actually or potentially into the present moment of speech, and so the pronoun you is appropriately called “second” person because it transports cardinal person to the immediate transcendence of the Self, representing the person(s) addressed both as participant(s) and as what is spoken of. The pronouns that transport cardinal person to a space outside both the Self and the speaking relationship represent something absent, bringing it into the act of speech merely as what is spoken of, not as participant, and so are appropriately called “third” person. Thus the “order of the persons” corresponds to the transferring of cardinal person from the Self to the Beyond-Self, situating it first within the speaking relationship and then outside it. The complexity of the system obliges us to approach it piecemeal, discussing the extensity of each pronoun and its place with regard to the speaking relationship. That is, we will focus first on the way the representation of each pronoun’s ordinal person characterizes its cardinal person, thereby actualizing its own spatial support, rather

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Beyond-Self

intended message

than on the way the resulting abstract notional import is configured by its morphological systems of gender and number. It was maintained above that only by narrowing down the field of consciousness to the place occupied by the self can consciousness of self as distinct from all the rest be obtained. To obtain a representation of that singular experience of one’s own self during an act of language, a speaker must carry out a particularizing process like that seen above: “a narrowing view … which, to define itself, gets rid of everything that is not strictly itself,” a process leaving only “the narrow Self, the personal Self, the singular Self, with nothing identical to it.”165 On the other hand, there is a difference between being aware of the self, a constant in our conscious mental life, and representing one’s own self by means of the pronoun I when we want to talk about it. This involves focusing on one’s self within the momentary field of consciousness, the intended message. Representing one’s self as what is being talked about involves, as Self, participating in the speech act; this gives the Self a specific position within the speaking relationship, implying thereby another participant in the relationship, an addressee. That is to say, the pronoun situates the Self representation of one’s self within a grammatical system, and thereby positions it in a relationship with another position, the occupant whereof may not be represented in the sentence or even actualized in the mind of the speaker. The following figure attempts to depict this process of representing the space occupied by the speaker, reached at the end of a discriminating movement that distinguishes the speaker’s space from the rest of the intended message and from what it entails regarding the speaking relationship:

I

The narrowing process is intercepted at its narrowest (any further would leave no view of space). The reverse, expanding process beyond this minimal representation is indicated by the dotted line to

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Beyond-Self

intended message

suggest that neither the other position in the speaking relationship nor anything else in the Beyond-Self is actualized by I. Since for any speaker I can designate only one entity, always the same, its extensity is invariable. Thus I brings in as its notional import a representation of the speaker’s consciousness of Self in the role of speaker. This characterizes its cardinal person by attributing to it a languaged (human) being as occupant of this space and limits its extensity to a minimum. In so doing, it predetermines both the pronoun’s gender and its number. That is, in its morphogenesis I can be categorized only as animate (and even as either masculine or feminine, for any given speaker) and only as singular. This is why I can be considered a “proper” pronoun. The capacity of cardinal person to represent the space occupied by the Self can be transferred to the space occupied by other entities. This, according to Guillaume, gives rise to the order of the other persons. Transferring it to an entity situated in a space beyond that occupied by I but within the speaking relationship calls for the second person. Having reached its limit with the position of the speaker, however, the movement through the field of the intended message must go beyond that position into the field of the Beyond-Self in order to reach the position of another participant in the speech act. This involves an expansive movement through the Beyond-Self to situate the other participant. However, this movement is intercepted the moment it begins through that field, at a position adjacent to that occupied by the speaker. This gives a representation of the minimal space occupied by the addressee, as suggested by the next figure, where the vertical line depicts the speaker’s position as a limit:

you

Here the speaker’s Self is not represented, but since there can be no speaking relationship without a speaker, attaining and going beyond the speaker’s prior position is implied as a necessary condition for representing the addressee’s position by you.

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Beyond-Self

intended message

Actualizing cardinal person as second person entails attributing to it the language potential required of any participant in the speaking relationship. This predetermines the gender of you so that it will be configured as animate during its morphogenesis, but since there is nothing to limit the subgender of you, this is left epicene or determined according to the particular addressee. Although its gender is predetermined, the second-person pronoun’s number is variable. That is, you can represent a single addressee as in the above figure, or a number of addressees, say the students in one’s class. This calls for a greater than minimal space, a representation obtained by intercepting the expanding movement somewhere beyond its beginning, as indicated in the following figure:

you

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Beyond-Self

intended message

In this case, the pronoun’s cardinal person is characterized as the support of a set of entities and so is configured as ‘discontinuate, plural’ in its morphogenesis. You can also be used to include a number of people who are not present but are viewed as potential addressees. In both these uses the space represented by you will be more extensive than for its second person singular use, and may even be represented without any limit in order to take in all possible addressees, as in You can never tell what will happen, where you represents the space occupied in the Beyond-Self by “people in general.” The following figure tries to suggest how, thanks to the expanding movement through space, “specific” you “shades into” “generic” you, as Wales points out:166

you

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Beyond-Self

intended message

As a “generic,” you should not be considered to include everything in the Beyond-Self, but only possible addressees, ‘people in general.’ That is, the distinction between what can participate in the speaking relationship and what cannot is implicit here, but is made explicit below in the discussion of third-person pronouns. As pointed out above, we cannot be properly called first person plural because I, representing only the speaker’s own self, cannot be multiplied and so is always singular. We, on the other hand, is plural because its cardinal person represents the space for a set or group that includes the speaker and another participant or others. In an exclusive use such as My wife and I … so we decided to … some would consider that we is a first-person pronoun here with “anaphoric reference” to the noun phrase and the pronoun. However, it is not made clear how the third person of the noun phrase can be included in the speaking relationship. On the other hand, if, as argued here, we corefers to the same space in the intended message as the preceding noun phrase – space represented by cardinal person – but not to the noun phrase itself, it is obvious that it must represent a divided space containing the place of the speaker and that of the other person, someone who could have said the same thing. This mixed person, including the speaker’s self in prospect and a potential speaker, can be obtained from the narrowing movement toward the space of the speaker by intercepting the movement just before the minimal space of I is reached, as suggested in the following figure:

we

In an inclusive use such as Why don’t we go together instead of taking two cars? if “it is a matter of you and me”167 we would represent the same narrow space for two participants, speaker and addressee, as in the figure. The distinction between this inclusive use and the preceding exclusive use is brought out by context and situation and not by the extent of space within the speaking relationship involved. Both inclusive and exclusive uses are found with more extensive representations of

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Beyond-Self

intended message

the space involved, such as the last example with a number of addressees and an exclusive use such as Where I come from we drive on the other side. These would arise somewhere in the middle of we’s narrowing movement toward the speaker’s position, as suggested by the following figure:

we

Beyond-Self

intended message

If its movement is intercepted still earlier, we will represent a greater space to provide a support for any number of others. Intercepted at its very beginning, this movement can give a use such as We have many more back problems than other primates, where, as Huddleston and Pullum suggest, we is at its widest – any human, including speaker and addressee(s), could say the same thing.168 In a figure:

we

The above figures try to suggest the operativity inherent in we’s potential meaning that permits it to express a range of different senses, from the most extensive to the narrowest. The set we expresses always represents the place of the speaker and that of any other participant(s) in the speaking relationship figuring in the speaker’s intended message. In contrast with first- and second-person pronouns, third-person pronouns represent non-participants, i.e. anything else one might talk about. That is, between them, he, she, one, it, and they have the capacity to represent the place occupied by an entity, someone or something, or a set of entities, anything outside the speaking

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relationship, anywhere else in the intended message reflecting the expanding universe of a speaker’s experience. As a consequence of this greater range, it is often necessary to indicate by other means, as in coreference and anticipatory uses, what occupies the space represented by the pronoun. None of them, however, can cover the whole of this range. That is, as we saw above, each of these pronouns characterizes its cardinal person differently. They’s cardinal person is actualized as a divided space to provide a support for a number of entities and so is configured grammatically as ‘plural, discontinuate.’ To provide a support for a single entity, the cardinal person of the other pronouns is actualized as an undivided space, either unbounded or bounded, and so they are configured by the system of number as ‘continuate, singular.’ It is here that distinctions of gender arise. Although the representation of gender complicates the analysis of third-person pronouns, it is pertinent for situating these pronouns in the system. This question does not arise with first- and second-person pronouns because they position their support within the speaking relationship, thus representing their referents as capable of participating in the act of speech. Characterizing the representation of a spatial support as third person transports it to a position outside the speaking relationship, where, as Wales points out, the question of “the third party’s potential roles” in speech arises for she and he.169 That is, since that outside position gives no indication of the referent’s capacity or non-capacity to participate in the speaking relationship, distinguishing entities for gender does offer an indication and so becomes a means of orienting reference. In particular, the cardinal person of it is characterized as third person with no indication of possible participation in the speaking relationship. As a consequence, its spatial support can be actualized as either bounded or unbounded and is configured by the system of gender as inanimate. The cardinal person of she, he, and one is characterized as third person capable of participating in the speaking relationship, with the consequence that it is actualized as a bounded space to provide a support for a single individual. This abstract import of all three pronouns is configured by the system of gender as animate. Unlike the other pronouns, one does not provide any indication such as coreference that would identify an individual, and so leaves its place in the intended message indefinite. These considerations are based on the hypothesis that grammatical gender, animate or inanimate, depends primarily on whether or not a capacity to participate in the speaking relationship is perceived.

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If it proves valid, this hypothesis will help explain why these pronouns give the clearest manifestation of gender in English. A first test of its validity is to see if it helps us position the third-person pronouns with regard to the relationship underlying the system of all the personal pronouns. The third-person pronouns situate their support outside the speaking relationship, a position attained as the result of a movement from within it (assuming that all speech arises from an awareness of Self, as discussed above). That is, these five pronouns represent a second phase of the system, a result of going beyond the first phase represented by the subsystem of the first- and second-person pronouns. This involves not only getting beyond the speaker’s position as you does, but getting beyond the speaking relationship as such to include the place of any entity, whether potential participant or not. To reach this new horizon in the Beyond-Self stretching far beyond that of the speaking relationship calls for a movement on a different dimension, away from the first horizon to a second phase or moment of the system. From the point of view of position within their subsystem, the most striking thing in the third-person pronouns is the opposition of number between they and the others. They usually represents a number of separate entities each occupying its own space, as in the students … they, but may involve merely an impression of multiplicity, as in the limpid waters of a mountain brook … they. Even when left indefinite without coreference, as in They say he is going to resign, the plurality of the pronoun comes out clearly. They can also represent the spatial support of an unlimited plural, a generic (Beavers are rodents. They live in …), and at the other extreme, the support for a single entity in the epicene use discussed above (Someone phoned you. They said …). This indicates that they can represent the same range of multiple supports as was proposed for the -s ending in the system of number for the substantive in my 2009 study. This continuum of possibilities in the Beyond-Self outside the speaking relationship can be depicted in a figure as follows:

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beyond the speaking relationship

they

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The dotted vector here depicts the potential meaning of they as a possible movement through the field of discontinuate quantity, a movement that can be intercepted at any point from an epicene singular to a generic sense to represent the quantity of space actually occupied by the pronoun’s cardinal person. Among the other third-person pronouns, it stands in opposition to the others for gender. That is, one, she, and he are all animate, indicating the capacity to participate in the speaking relationship, whereas it alone is inanimate, indicating no capacity to participate in it. This would seem to indicate that it is further removed from the speaking relationship than the others, that it provides the most abstract representation of space in the system. This explains why it is sometimes considered a “dummy” pronoun. That is, within this second phase of the system accessed from the first phase along an exteriorizing dimension, the animate pronouns appear to arise before the inanimate pronoun, as though the subsystem of thirdperson pronouns itself involves two moments or levels reflecting different links with the speaking relationship. Insofar as their grammatical number is concerned, he, she, and it have as plural they. This does not, however, entail that they necessarily represent the space for a single entity. We have seen that it has a range of representation for spatial supports configured for number as ‘continuate,’ a range stretching from the support of the intended message as a whole – a space to be characterized in the sentence itself (It’s true that I forgot to tell him) – through any unbounded space as support for a ‘mass’ notion (They’ve struck water. It is easily accessible.) to a bounded space as support of a particular thing (Where’s my watch? It’s on the table.), where it is configured as ‘minimal continuate, singular.’ If we agree with Bolinger “that all the uses of it stem from a common semantic base,”170 we are led to conceive of its underlying meaning as a potential permitting the “gradient” of senses examined above, a potential consisting of a movement from the total field of the intended message through unbounded space to the minimum space required for a bounded entity, a movement that can be intercepted at any point to represent whatever extent of the support space is appropriate for the intended message. As for the animate pronouns, one represents a bounded space of an individual situated anywhere in an extensity ranging from a vaguely defined set of people (What one calls social conscience is often …) to one so restricted as to imply actual participants (One can’t

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one

s/he it

beyond the speaking relationship

intended message

be too careful in these matters, can one?) and even to a single individual (leaving the property  … to one Ann Duncan). As a consequence it is configured as ‘singular,’ but since its place in space is not determined, it does not identify the individual and so is configured for gender as ‘animate,’ but not for subgender. She and he also represent a bounded space and so are configured for number as ‘singular,’ but their range of extensity appears to be restricted to a minimal space (assuming, as mentioned above, that uses in proverbs such as He who hesitates is lost are archaic). On the other hand, they can situate their spatial support and identify the person for subgender. Thus, between them, the animate pronouns have a range of extensities in their field of possible participants in the speaking relationship equivalent to that of the inanimate pronoun in its field. To situate each of these pronouns in their third-person subsystem, two traits characterizing their cardinal person – spatial extension predetermining how they can be configured for number, and participant capacity predetermining how they can be configured for gender – must be taken into account. To be noted is that the trait distinguishing she from he and predetermining subgender is not pertinent here because it appears to have no effect on their link with the speaking relationship, nor on their extensity. As a consequence, both appear to occupy the same position in this subsystem (though not, of course, in the subsystem of animate gender.) We have seen that one arises on the first level of the third-person subsystem to depict some individual in a variable set of possible participants in the speaking relationship, thus predetermining its gender as animate, but it does not, like she and he, identify the individual to the point of predetermining its subgender. That is, she and he appear to go further than one in characterizing their spatial support and in limiting their extensity. This can be suggested by the following figure:

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one

beyond the speaking relationship

intended message

Arising on the second level of the third-person subsystem, the level for entities that are not possible participants in the speaking relationship, it can represent extensities of spatial supports extending from the spatial support of the intended message itself to a single entity within it, as suggested by the following figure:

s/he it

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one

s/he it

they

beyond the speaking relationship

intended message

It, like one, can be actualized by intercepting its movement at different points to give different extensities, but unlike one, it can situate its entity by coreference in the intended message. Finally, beyond the contracting, singularizing movement of these four pronouns, they arises as an expanding movement stretching from its minimum (the unresolved dual of subgender) to a multiple spatial support unlimited in extent expressing a generic sense, as suggested in the following figure:

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They is situated astride the expanding vector here because its gender is not predetermined by its abstract notional meaning but by the entities occupying the space it represents – whether or not they are possible participants in the speaking relationship. The very fact that it can provide the plural for both genders indicates that these five pronouns really do form a single subsystem. r e s u lt s

within the speaking relationship

intended message

This attempt to probe the system of personal pronouns in light of the speaking relationship to account for observed usage has given results that are only tentative. It appears that the subsystem of pronouns representing positions within the speaking relationship consists of a two-phase movement, a contracting movement ending in the position of the Self, and an expansive movement going beyond it. This makes it possible to represent the varying extensities of we and you, and the fixed extensity of I. Their subsystem, which is that of the speaking relationship, can be represented as a potential in tongue by the following figure:

These pronouns, each in its own way, thus represent the space of something in the intended message and situate it within the speaking relationship. We have seen that the subsystem of pronouns representing positions outside the speaking relationship appears to consist of a two-phase movement distinguished by number, as well as two levels distinguished by gender. As a potential in tongue, this can be depicted by the following figure:

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intended message

beyond the speaking relationship Beyond-Self

speaking relationship

intended message

One, it, she, he, and they, each in its own place in the subsystem, represent the spatial support of something in the intended message and situate it outside the speaking relationship. These two subsystems are linked together to constitute the system of the personal pronouns. They stem from the human capacity to distinguish Self from Beyond-Self and to represent the experience of one’s own self in its own space. This capacity to represent by means of cardinal person space occupied, as distinct from what occupies it, can be transferred outside the first person to places occupied by other participants in the speaking relationship and to places occupied by non-participants outside the speaking relationship. This gives rise to a two-phase system in tongue that can be suggested as follows:

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2nd person

3nd person

Beyond-Self

beyond the speaking relationship

intended message

1st person

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This figure attempts to suggest that the necessary movement involved in getting beyond the speaking relationship entails the two subsystems arising at different moments of the system. Moreover, it shows the important link between their two focal points: the minimal space occupied by I around which the rest of the space of the speaking relationship can be deployed and represented by we and you; and the minimal space occupied by he, she, and minimal it around which the space of the rest of the intended message can be deployed and represented by one, non-minimal it, and they. This figure tries to bring out what makes it possible for each pronoun to represent the range of extensities it can express in discourse and gives the system itself the potential to represent the space occupied by anything a speaker may want to talk about. conclusion

We have based this analysis on Guillaume’s theory of the parts of speech, which postulates that every pronoun, like every substantive, is constructed during the moment of speech by a two-phase operation consisting of ideogenesis, a process representing something in the intended message to give each pronoun its particular material import, followed by morphogenesis, a process configuring this representation grammatically to give the word the same general form as others formed by the same part of speech. Inherent in the ideogenesis of both substantive and pronoun is cardinal person, which represents a place in the intended message to provide a spatial support within the word for its material import – for the lexical import specific to a particular substantive and for the abstract notional import specific to a particular pronoun. Unlike a substantive’s material import, which represents the nature of whatever occupies that place in the intended message, a pronoun’s material import represents only certain general characteristics conditioning how cardinal person represents that place. It remains that, during the ideogenesis of both substantive and pronoun, the word’s material import characterizes its spatial support, preparing it to be configured grammatically during its morphogenesis. In trying to discern how the particular meaning import of each pronoun characterizes its cardinal person support, we have seen that the capacity or (in the case of it) non-capacity to participate in the speaking relationship is a component of the pronoun’s abstract

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meaning, predetermining how it will be configured by the system of gender. They alone has no such characterizing trait and so can be configured for either gender. Furthermore, a characterization predetermining subgender is brought in by she, he, and, for a given speaker, I. We have seen that we, you, and they bring in a component characterizing their spatial support as multiple or at least divided, thus predetermining their configuration for number as ‘discontinuate, plural’ (or as pluralizable in the case of minimal you), whereas I, she, he, one, and it characterize their spatial support as either unbounded (only it) or bounded, thus predetermining their configuration by the system of number as ‘continuate,171 singular.’ Finally, we have seen that each pronoun brings in its ordinal person to characterize the support’s place with regard to the speaking relationship. The system proposed is operative, rather than the static sort of table given in grammars. This appears to be necessary for two reasons. We have seen that some of the pronouns – we, you, one, it, they – have actualizations depicting diverse extensities of their spatial supports, a variation in sense manifesting their polysemy. The problem of polysemy, which arises in any discussion of meaning, has been dealt with elsewhere by postulating that the potential meaning of a grammatical word or a morpheme provides a range of possible senses and a scanning movement that can be intercepted to actualize the extent within this range best representing the extensity required. This gives rise to a “gradient” or “continuum” or “cline” of senses derived from a single meaning potential, and so provides a more satisfying explanation than that sometimes given of simply listing senses or even proposing homonyms for each sense observed. It remains that, as a first attempt at systematizing the personal pronouns on an operative basis, the above proposal can certainly be improved on, or replaced, by confronting it with many more uses. This applies particularly to the evidence for limiting he and she to a single, bounded spatial support and to the related question of including one in the personal pronouns. Furthermore, questions such as the determiner uses of we and you, as well as the spatial traits involved in gender (when using she and he to designate the sex of an animal) and the role of case, call for further observation and reflection in more specialized studies to throw light on what is proposed here. In this way, the assumptions concerning the speaking relationship – potential speakers, potential addressees, potential participants, non-participants – to discern positions in the system can be confirmed, modified,

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or replaced. Finally, the system itself must be situated with regard to the other systems of pronouns to see if the same approach can bring out the relations between them and justify the assumption that pronouns form a part of speech with several subsystems. Proposing an operative system of pronouns is a necessary consequence of Guillaume’s general postulate that we reconstruct a word from its formative elements each time we want to use it in a sentence. That is, for each use, a pronoun’s abstract material import (comprehension) with its range of representational possibilities (extension) is called to mind as a potential to be actualized by the speaker in the manner best representing the intended message to be expressed. To account both for ordinary uses involving polysemy and for innovative uses, this constructional view of word usage has proven more satisfactory than the often-proposed static view of a mental lexicon listing various senses under each item.172 Finally, one important result of the proposed system is to bring out how personal pronouns resemble substantives and how they differ from them. The essential difference is, of course, between their respective material imports – that is, the same general type of word formation whereby the import resulting from ideogenesis (whether a substantive’s actualized lexeme or a pronoun’s abstract meaning) can predetermine how the systems of gender and number configure that particular word’s material input during its morphogenesis, the grammaticalizing process carrying its import to the ultimate generalization as a part of speech. By bringing out the grammatical resemblances between substantives and pronouns, our analysis helps explain how pronouns can be configured for case and so fulfil the same functions as noun phrases in the sentence, and therefore how they provide a signpost to the referent in the intended message. The underlying similarity here is that both types of word have cardinal person as a formative element providing an internal support for the word’s material import. This is another area of English grammar bearing out Meillet’s dictum that the grammatical side of tongue is “a system where everything fits together and has a wonderfully rigorous design.”173

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Concluding Thoughts Man is an exception among thinking beings due to the fact that he is the only such being able to recognize the independence that thinking beings enjoy from the universe they live in; this he does by means of thought, which allows him to know that he exists. Gustave Guillaume1

The attempt made in these pages to reinstate the word, the vocable of a minimal unit of meaning in human language, in the eyes of linguists brings us to the consideration of linguistics as a science. Language as an object of scientific wonder – “I wonder how it works” – is particular among all the wonders of the world that science is exploring today. As Guillaume suggests, wonder requires us to stand back mentally from our experience of the universe to view it as objectively as we can. The only way that we have of attaining this “independence of thinking” is by means of human language, of our mother tongue (or a second language) enabling us to represent our experience by means of its words. This makes language a prior condition, a necessary precondition, for any scientific wonderment and gives it a special place among the objects of science. By the same token, this distinguishes human language from all other means of communication, and thereby proposes something else to wonder about: what enabled man to make human language in the first place (and what enables infants to remake it during the acquisition of their mother tongue)? This positions human nature itself as an object of wonder, which would take us far beyond the scope of linguistics and so is best left to others. This “standing back” from language is reflected by the invention of analytical categories such as grammatical rules, syntactic trees, prototypes, and the like. These may be helps for getting inside the

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“closed watch” of the word in English, provided they are not reified. To take them as really existing in a sentence could block further observation of the sentence with its total meaning, its means of expression, its intonation, its linguistic context, the speaking relationship, the situational context, etc. – whatever for the listener/ reader makes a sentence a unique object of observation as it is for the speaker/writer who created it. Coming back to the word in this way, one is reminded of the quandary of a botanist2 reflecting on the geometrical forms by which plants are traditionally classified: “In the living world, forms are never as ideally perfect as they are in a geometric figure. For nature is in fragile equilibrium.” Such classes are but a rough approximation, at best a first guide to further observation of each individual plant’s “morphogenesis,” i.e. how it has developed in its particular conditions and environment. Hopefully these pages will have awakened that curiosity, that “wondering” about the specificity of each sentence with its lexico-morphogenetic word-units as spoken or heard in normal everyday speech.

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Glossary

C a r d ina l P e r son: a grammatical category that represents the space occupied by whatever a noun, pronoun, or verb represents. C o mple t i v e P r onoun: a pronoun completing a noun phrase and functioning as determiner. C o n signi fy : to signify a word’s grammatical meaning, when combined with its lexical meaning. D esig n at um : the experiential (mental) entity in the In te n d e d Messa ge referred to by a word or expression. Ex t en s i t y : the portion of a lexeme’s Re p re s e n tatio n al R a n g e (extension) expressed in a particular use. Ex t er na l I nc i de nc e : applying the lexical Imp o rt of a word or phrase to a Sup p ort outside its own extension. Id eo g e ne si s: the mental operation of calling to mind the lexical Impo rt, concrete or abstract, specific to a particular word. Impo rt: the meaning a word or phrase brings into the sentence. Impo rt C a se : the syntactic case of a noun phrase applying its Impo rt to another component of the sentence. In c id enc e : applying the lexical I mp o rt of a word or phrase to its Su pp ort . In t en d e d De si gnat um : the experiential (mental) entity in the In t en d e d M e ssa ge the speaker wants to refer to by a word or expression.

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202 Glossary

In t en d ed M e ssa ge : a content of consciousness (feeling, percept, thought, dream, etc.) outside language that one wants to express by means of language. In t er n al I nc i de nc e : applying the lexical Imp o rt of a word (substantive) or phrase (noun phrase) to a S u p p o rt within its extension. Mo r phoge ne si s: the mental operation of categorizing a word’s lexical Im p ort to form it as a part of speech. N o n -Pr e di c at i v e P a rt s of Sp e ech : grammatical words (pronouns, conjunctions, etc.) that represent something in the assembling of a sentence. O r d i n a l P e r s o n : a category that represents the space occupied by first and second persons, participant(s) in the speaking relationship, and third person, non-participant(s) outside the speaking relationship. Pr ed ic at i v e P a rt s of Sp e e c h : lexical words (substantive, verb, adjective, adverb) that represent something in the speaker’s In t en d e d M e ssa ge . Psyc ho ge ne si s: the mental operations involved in forming the meaning of a word, both lexical and grammatical. R efer enc e : referring the meaning expressed to its extra-linguistic D esig n at um in the speaker’s I nt e n d e d M e s s ag e . R efer ent : the I nt e nde d M e ssa g e (or part of it) designated by the meaning of a word, phrase, or sentence. (= D e s ig n atu m) R efer ent i a l I nc i de nc e : applying the meaning of a sentence to its Su p p ort outside language in the In te n d e d Me s s ag e . (cf. Sy n tac t i c I nc i de nc e ) R epr esentat i on: portraying by means of a lexeme something in the In t en de d M e ssa ge . R epr esentat i ona l R a nge : the range of entities, events, qualities, etc. in the I nt e nde d M e ssa g e a L e x e me can represent; its extension. Semio g e ne si s: the process of actualizing a word’s sign during the act of expression. (cf. P syc hoge ne s is )

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Glossary 203

Su pple t i v e P r onoun: a pronoun functioning as a syntactic unit, as a noun phrase. Su ppo rt : what any meaning I m p o rt is said about, what it characterizes by being made incident to it. Support Case: the syntactic case of a noun phrase serving as Support for the Import of another component of the sentence. Sy n tac t i c I nc i de nc e : applying the Im p o rt of a word or phrase to another word or phrase. (cf. Re f e re n tial In cid e n ce ) Sy n t he t i c C a se : a grammatical component of the substantive giving the noun phrase its function, either Im p o rt or S u p p o rt C a se.

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Notes

chapter one

1 Guillaume 1984, 145. 2 Damasio 1999. 3 Ibid., 116. 4 Eccles 1994. 5 Bolinger and Sears 1981, 2. 6 Taylor 1985, 246. 7 Rizzolatti and Craighero 2004, 183. 8 Goldstein et al. 2006, 1. 9 di Sciullo cited in Kettani 2008 (my translation). 10 Langacker 1987, 5. 11 Ibid., 100, 138. 12 Artigas 2001, 232. 13 Frye 1971, 1124. It is worth citing the whole passage: “it is clear that all verbal structures with meaning are verbal imitations of that elusive psychological and physiological process known as thought, a process stumbling through emotional entanglements, sudden irrational convictions, involuntary gleams of insight, rationalized prejudices, and blocks of panic and inertia, finally to reach a completely incommunicable intuition.” 14 Words may of course be used in their most abstract senses to represent the high degree of generalization found in scientific and philosophical thought. 15 James 1890, 245. 16 The Economist Technological Quarterly (3 September 2011), 24. 17 Damasio 2010, 15n. The same note acknowl­edges that “[t]he burden of proof does rest with those who find it natural for mind states to be constituted by brain activity.” However, only two pages later in the text (p. 17),

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Notes to pages 12–16

the author introduces “some basic facts,” the first of which is that “[o]rganisms make minds out of the activity of special cells known as ­neurons,” thus presuming what needs to be proved. 18 Even in interior discourse where the sign is not physically actualized. 19 Damasio 2010, 15n. 20 See my Language in the Mind (Hirtle 2007a) for a description of how a word is constructed in English, and my Making Sense out of Meaning (Hirtle 2013) for how a word’s lexeme can be exploited to express different senses. 21 “sculpter le psychique dans le physiologique” (Guillaume 1971, 47). 22 Penfield 1966, 236. chapter two

  1 Guillaume 1984, 3.   2 Taylor 2003, 202.   3 Davis 1993, 83.   4 Bolinger 1963, 113.   5 Miller 1991, viii.   6 Fromkin et al. 2013, 92.   7 Langacker 2013, 96.   8 Taylor 2003, 210.   9 Carnie 2012, 44, 47. 10 Ibid., 48. 11 Taylor 1996, 72–3. 12 Saussure 1916, 154 (my translation): “Il faudrait chercher sur quoi se fonde la division en mots – car le mot, malgré la difficulté qu’on a à le définir, est une unité qui s’impose à l’esprit, quelque chose de central dans le mécanisme de la langue; – mais c’est là un sujet qui remplirait à lui seul un volume.” 13 Guillaume 1919: “Le présent ouvrage est un essai d’application de la méthode comparative de la partie formelle des langues” (11). 14 The French term langue will be translated “tongue,” with the sense it has in the expression “mother tongue.” 15 Guillaume 1929, 121: “Pour étudier la langue dans des conditions qui se rapprocheraient le plus possible des conditions réelles de son emploi, il faudrait partir, comme le sujet parlant, de la langue à l’état virtuel et accomplir avec lui l’actualisation (la réalisation) du virtuel dont elle se compose.” 16 For an application of this approach to English, see my Lessons on the English Verb (Hirtle 2007b).

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Notes to pages 16–22

207

17 “Psycho-mechanism” in the sense of mental operation is to be understood here, not in the reductionist sense of neurochemical processes, but rather as systematized, repeatable thought processes. 18 There are occasions, however, where we have to take a second look mentally, as when trying to find what a pronoun refers to in a poorly written sentence, or to understand the joke in a pun. For example: I wondered why the baseball was getting bigger … then it hit me. 19 Cf. Bloomfield 1933, 13. 20 Guillaume 1984, 133. 21 Since we will be tracing the development of Guillaume’s views during his teaching years, citations (my translation throughout) from the Leçons de linguistique series are hereafter referenced when useful in the text by date of writing. Year of publication and page number of each volume of the lecture series will be given in notes. Here, 2013b, 9–10 : “il n’est de fonction que de ce qui existe préalablement, si courte la préalabilité soit-elle … La fonction, l’emploi des choses n’excède jamais, ne sort jamais de ses possibilités existentielles.” 22 That is, until his death in 1960, during which time he taught at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris. Most of his weekly or biweekly lectures have been published in the series Leçons de linguistique. 23 “La science est fondée sur l’intuition que le monde des apparences parle de choses cachées, dont elles sont l’image et qui ne ressemblent pas” (Guillaume 1972, 17). Cf. the translated passages in Guillaume 1984, 3. 24 “la langue forme un système où tout se tient et a un plan d’une mer­ veilleuse rigueur” (Guillaume 1972, 17). 25 Bloomfield 1933, 178. Like Saussure, Bloomfield recognizes, but does not dwell on, the fact that “the word has great structural importance” (183). chapter three

1 Einstein and Infeld 1966, 31. 2 We are concerned here only with the word in Indo-European languages, and more particularly in English. To speak of the basic unit in other language families, the more general term vocable would be used in order to avoid the error of presuming that all languages have words as we know them. 3 For these historical details see Michael 1970, 44–7. 4 Sapir 1921, 24, 32–4. 5 Huddleston and Pullum 2002, 26, 2, 28. In chapter 5 of my 2013 study on lexical semantics, I have argued that what grammarians call conversion is not a valid hypothesis to explain uses such as Will he medal tonight?

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Notes to pages 22–33

6 Miller 1991, 5. 7 Einstein and Infeld 1966, 283. 8 For a discussion of the mental lexicon assumption, see Hirtle 2013, ch. 5. 9 For a description of the comparative method and an outline of how Guillaume applied it to a problem in synchrony, see Valin 1996. 10 Guillaume 2010, 1–15. 11 This of course applies not just to the language learned from one’s mother, but to whatever language of which one has acquired as potentials the unconscious lexical, grammatical, and phonemic constituents. The term tongue is used here in this more extended sense. 12 I am tempted to say “a part-of-speeched” lexeme. 13 For his method of analysis, see Hirtle 2007a, ch. 6. 14 See Wickens 1992 for a far more complete discussion, including ailment names (the creeps, the mumps, etc.), binary objects (pliers, trousers, etc.) and many other uses. 15 For a description of the system of number in English, see Hirtle 2009a, ch. 5–7. 16 See ibid., ch. 8. 17 Consignify: “to signify grammatical meaning along with the lexical meaning a word signifies.” This idea that the part of speech determining a word’s syntactic function is part of the word’s meaning was introduced by the speculative grammarians of the Middle Ages but not retained by Renaissance grammarians (cf. Michael 1970, 46n.). 18 Cf. Guillaume 2010, 1–15. 19 The adjective in English is no longer inflected for gender and number, as it is in other languages. 20 Huddleston and Pullum 2002, 526, 564. 21 See my Language in the Mind (Hirtle 2007a) for a more complete description and illustrations of his theory. 22 For a justification of this way of viewing a word, see my 2013 study on lexical semantics, ch. 5. 23 Examined in Essay 8. 24 Hewson, private communication. chapter four

1 Guillaume 1973, 61 (from lecture of 14 January 1949): “La théorie de la personne telle que nous la concevons nous met en présence d’un fait rele­ vant de la grammaire tout à fait générale … c’est que, dans le discours, il est toujours parlé de quelque chose, qui est ce dont on parle …”

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Notes to pages 34–44

209

2 Jespersen 1954, 125; Huddleston and Pullum 2002, 1463–4. 3 Quirk et al. 1985, 339–40. 4 Cited in Michael 1970, 324. 5 Ibid., 323. 6 Cited in ibid., 70. 7 Ibid., 326. 8 Guillaume 1992, 134; cf. also 58. 9 Tongue (Fr. la langue), as mentioned above, is the potential for forming words and sentences that infants acquire when they learn their mother tongue. 10 Guillaume 1990, 101, 103, 109. 11 Guillaume 1973, 61. 12 Guillaume 1990, 103. 13 Of course the listeners one has in view, the situation, and other pragmatic circumstances will also influence the choice of words and how they are combined. 14 Guillaume 1990, 122; see Hirtle 2009a. 15 Interjections such as Wow! are an obvious exception, as Guillaume points out (2009, 1–2). 16 In French often called incidence logique. 17 For Guillaume’s theory of the parts of speech based on this view of word construction, see below and the following essay. 18 Carnie 2012, 11. 19 Guillaume 1999, 128. 20 Guillaume 1990, 101. 21 Cf. Guillaume 1987, 177. 22 Guillaume 1999, 129. 23 Guimier 1986, 37. 24 Guillaume 1999, 133. 25 Rather than the term extension, which is so often used by scholars to indicate what a lexeme can denote in the external universe, I often use the expression representational range or range of representation to indicate what a lexeme can represent and designate in the speaker’s intended message. 26 Guillaume 1999, 130. 27 Guillaume 1973, 56. 28 Ibid., 62. 29 It is sometimes objected that it is the rest of the sentence that indicates the extensity, not the noun phrase a car, which does not change. This observation is quite valid as to how listeners/readers discern the extensity, since they have access only to the spoken/written signs. However, it fails

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Notes to pages 44–53

to take into account the speaker/writer, who must actualize the lexeme car to represent the intended message, where the entity is perceived, and so is represented, as a singular or a generic or as somewhere between these extremes (as in An electric car is more economical). 30 Guillaume 1981, 21–41. 31 See Hirtle 2009a, ch. 11. 32 See ibid., ch. 13. 33 See Hirtle 2013, ch. 13. 34 Cf. Guillaume 1987, 250. 35 Cf. Guimier 1986, 37. 36 Duffley 1994; 1996/7; Hirtle 2007b, ch. 9. 37 Unless the ordinal ranking of the support is obvious, as in imperatives, inner dialogue (cf. Hirtle 2007b, 109), direct dialogue (See you later), and the like. 38 Except in cases of personification such as Mirror, mirror on the wall. 39 Guillaume 1987, 236–7. In seeming contradiction to this passage is a remark just preceding it: “in the substantive the ordinal characterization is in fact absent.” However, Guillaume appears to have in mind the substantive as a system in tongue, since in the next lesson (p. 243) he states: “Cardinal person in tongue exists in the absence of discourse … cardinal person of discourse is subject to an ordinal characterization. It is characterized first or second or third. This characterization accompanies and is representative of its realization, or if you will, its actualization.” 40 The fact that mental entities can be configured for number (hope/hopes) indicates that they are represented spatially, albeit for a broad and perhaps abstract definition of “space.” 41 This also applies to telling a lie: the speaker knowingly imagines a false scenario as an intended message and represents this. See my study on lexical semantics (Hirtle 2013) for a discussion of how metaphor permits a substantive to refer to something outside its representational range. Irony, which involves letting (certain) listeners know that one is really thinking the contrary of what the sentence expresses, calls for further observation and reflection. 42 Quirk et al. 1985, 253. 43 Guillaume 1987, 250. 44 Cf. Quirk et al. 1985, 348f, 748f. See the discussion in Hirtle 2009a, 321–4. 45 Hirtle 2009a, 349. 46 Guillaume 1999, 129. 47 Guillaume 1987, 241. 48 Ibid., 251, 253.

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Notes to pages 53–62

211

49 Guillaume 1990, 101. 50 Guillaume 1973, 46. 51 Guillaume 1987, 255. This suggests he was still trying to get a clear view of the preposition. 52 Guillaume 1990, 111, 126. 53 Guillaume 1987, 235, 248–9, 251. 54 Guillaume 1991, 116. His comment that maison (home) “is adjectived” here describes, as do other grammarians, how it functions but does not specify its part of speech. In Essay 6 below, this attributive use will be examined in light of his view of case in the substantive. 55 Quirk et al. 1985, 438. 56 Guillaume 2009, 221–2. 57 Guillaume 1987, 252. 58 Guillaume 1997, 157. A footnote by the editor reads: “In the manuscript: + instead of positive, and instead of ‘negative’, replacing the crossed out sign – .” 59 Ibid., 176. 60 It would seem that sentence adverbs (Unfortunately, he was …) can even be incident to the process of referential incidence whereby the meaning of the sentence is referred to its support in the intended message. This possibility, implied by Valin’s analysis of the noun phrase (1981), is explored in great detail in the last chapter of Guimier’s study (1988). 61 The parts of speech observed in “lexical words” as opposed to the nonpredicative parts of speech found in “grammatical words.” 62 Guillaume 1990, 109. 63 Ibid., 101–2. 64 Ibid., 85. 65 The fact that the adjective in English no longer manifests agreement in gender and number calls for further reflection to determine its morphogenesis. 66 Guillaume 1987, 253, 255. 67 Guillaume 1973, 64. 68 Guillaume 2009, 239, 245. 69 Guillaume 1987, 233, 252, 255. 70 Guillaume 1990, 109. 71 Guillaume 1973, 113. 72 Guillaume 1997, 47. 73 Guillaume’s examples: Il y va à contrecœur and Il y va le cœur triste (1973, 228). 74 See Essays 6 and 7 for a discussion of the adverbial use of a noun phrase. 75 Guillaume 1987, 255.

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Notes to pages 62–70

76 Guillaume 1973, 46. 77 Ibid., 63. 78 Guillaume 1997, 33. 79 Guillaume 1982, 130. 80 Taylor 1996, 334–5. 81 Guillaume 1999, 133. 82 See Hirtle 2009a, ch. 10 and 11. 83 Guillaume 1999, 339. 84 Guillaume 1985, 61. 85 Guillaume 1973, 55. 86 See Hirtle 2007a, ch. 9, and Hirtle 2009a, ch. 14 and 15. 87 Guillaume 1973, 55. 88 Ibid., 54. 89 Ibid., 52. 90 Guillaume 1997, 193. 91 Ibid., 194. 92 Guillaume 2009, 251–2. “Extension” here is to be understood simply as an extent or stretch of space. 93 Certain grammarians and linguists have observed that the -’s, often called the “possessive” or “genitive” case, fulfils the role of a determiner. See Hirtle 2009a, ch. 4 and 18, for a discussion. 94 Guillaume 2010, 253. 95 Guillaume 1992, 58–9, 134. 96 Guillaume 2009, 177. 97 Ibid., 178. 98 Guillaume 2010, 5. 99 Ibid., 174, 175. 100 Ibid., 200. 101 Boas and Powell 1911, 35; Humboldt 1836, 95. 102 Hors-moi is translated literally by “beyond-self” (rather than the less cumbersome “not-self” or “non-self”) in order to bring out the more concrete spatial and operative relationship underlying Guillaume’s view of person. 103 Guillaume 2010, 200. 104 Guillaume had first introduced the binary tensor into his teaching only four months earlier, applying it to the article and number (2010, 5, 27), but apparently not yet envisaging its application elsewhere. 105 Ibid., 253. 106 Guillaume 1987, 124. See the English translation of the discovery of this “nascent idea” in Guillaume 1984, 49–50. 107 Guillaume 1987, 182.

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Notes to pages 70–82

213

108 Guillaume 2010, 206–7. 109 Ibid., 256. 110 Guillaume 2005, 404, 409, 424–5. 111 Guillaume 1999, 128, 129, 133. 112 Guillaume 1990, 85, 109. 113 Guillaume 1992, 127, 134. 114 Guillaume 1987, 178–9. 115 Guillaume 2007. 116 Guillaume 1984, 152. 117 Guillaume 1987, 241. 118 Michael 1970, 44. 119 Guillaume 2007, 64, 129. 120 Guillaume 2003, 127. chapter five

1 See Essay 6 for possessive -’s. 2 Langacker 2013, 23. This includes “physical objects, the noun category prototype. It figures subsequently in the apprehension of the many other kinds of entities also coded by nouns” (35). 3 To distinguish between extension, the total range of a lexeme’s representation potential, and the scope of extension actually represented in a particular use, Guillaume adopted the term extensity. 4 Cf. Quirk et al. 1985, 339–40; Huddleston and Pullum 2002, 1463–4. 5 Guillaume 1999, 128. 6 Metaphor calls for special consideration, as pointed out in Hirtle 2013. 7 For Guillaume (1991, B, 137), incidence “has to do with the absolutely general movement in language whereby, always and everywhere, there is an import of meaning and referring of the import to a support. The relating of import to support is covered by the mechanism of incidence.” 8 See Hirtle 2013, ch. 13 for discussion. 9 The -ly suffix, indicating an adverb as opposed to an adjective (quick/ quickly) or an adjective as opposed to a substantive (prince/princely) is not sufficiently widespread to be a morphological suffix of the part of speech. See the discussion of this “somewhat heterogeneous” category in Huddleston and Pullum 2002, 562–70. 10 See Essay 7 for a discussion of the verb. 11 The substantive also enables a noun phrase to provide the support for a finite verb’s event, but the external incidence of a time word to a space word is different from that of an adjective.

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Notes to pages 83–90

12 Jespersen 1954, 273, 272. 13 See Roey 1964 for other examples of this. 14 Huddleston and Pullum 2002, 417, 538. 15 Jespersen 1954, 486. 16 Guillaume makes a similar point for adjectives in French (1997, 30) when he points out that an adjective intervening early is applied to the process of forming a substantive and precedes the substantive in discourse. 17 Guillaume here (1992, 140) refers only to gender, but later (2009, 171) extends the discussion to number. chapter six

1 Blake 2001, 1; Butt 2006, 6–7. 2 Butt 2006, 224, 4, 199. 3 Schlesinger 1995, 29. 4 Quirk et al. 1985, 515; Huddleston and Pullum 2002, 5337. 5 Anderson 2006, 2. 6 As Dolbec and Leflem claim (1980, 318). 7 Anderson 2006, 3. 8 Although it presupposes that the speaker has formed the word(s) required, the noun phrase constitutes a distinct unit, “a category which cannot be said to exist, in grammar, until modern times” (Michael 1970, 44). Whether made up of one or more words, it is a grammatical unit capable of establishing syntactic relations with other parts of the sentence. The term “noun” is used here to designate a substantive actualized as a minimal syntactic unit, a one-word noun phrase. 9 Case is discussed in Hirtle 2009a (358–67), but I make no mention there of the noun phrase as attributive. 10 Quirk et al. 1985, 318–28. 11 Taylor 1996, 19. 12 See Hewson and Bubenik 2006, ch. 12, for the development of prepositions. 13 Huddleston and Pullum 2002, 448. 14 Guillaume 2005, 3. 15 Valin 1994, 388. 16 Ibid., 393. 17 As Duffley (2006, 161) points out, compared with a substantive “the internal semantic composition of a verb is more complex … in that it involves a relation between an event-originator and an event, in addition to that between the event and the lexeme designating the event’s nature.” To

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Notes to pages 91–7

215

have this space-time (originator-event) relation within the verb calls for something to represent the originator, the person of the verb. 18 Only to be and the -s of other verbs make person visible in the English verb. 19 Preceding the full verb. When the subject follows an auxiliary, it generally signifies that the incidence of verb to subject is questioned, left in abeyance (cf. Hirtle 2007b, 179–84). 20 This of course is not to exclude situations where the subject can be taken for granted by the speaker, as in the conversational “See you later!” or the prepositional phrase response in “Where’s the vacuum cleaner?” “In the kitchen.” 21 A view quite different from that of Dolbec and Leflem (1980, 321–2), for whom the predicative complement is incident to a second intraverbal person. 22 Ibid., 318. For a discussion of different approaches see Guimier 1986, 83–100. 23 Duffley 2006, 161. 24 Cf. Quirk et al. 1985, 514–15, 526–8; and Schibsbye 1973, 92. Carnie (2012, 115) names such uses “nominal adverbials.” 25 Schibsbye points out that “the expression with for has the association ‘part of a greater whole,’” an expressive effect discussed in my 1975 article. 26 See Huddleston and Pullum 2002, 599, for prepositions governing other types of phrase. 27 See ibid., 646–7, for discussion. 28 Quirk et al. 1985, 1301. 29 Ibid., 1305. 30 Coordination, as in Anna, my best friend, and my brother were all here last night would express quite a different relation. 31 Quirk et al. 1985, 773. 32 Huddleston and Pullum 2002, 523. 33 See ibid., 522–3, for a variety of examples. 34 Hirtle 2009a, 34n. 35 Bolinger 1967, 2–3. 36 Jespersen 1954, II, 310f, 327. 37 Coates 1971, 169. 38 Dierickx 1970, 40. 39 Ryder 1994, 46, 95. 40 Warren 1978, 239, 257; Taylor 2003, 94n. 41 Langacker 2013, 202. Cf. “since the composite expression jar lid is a noun, it can function as the first component of the higher-order compound jar lid factory” (172). 42 Bauer 1998, 68, 65. The discussion in Huddleston and Pullum (2002, 448–51) also points out the “imperfect” correlation between the various

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Notes to pages 97–103

criteria and syntactic tests available to distinguish between “composite nominals” and compounds. 43 Jespersen 1954, VI, 138. 44 Downing 1977, 839. 45 Taylor 2003, 95. 46 Huddleston and Pullum 2002, 448–51; Bauer 1998, 65. 47 Jespersen 1954, II, 310f. 48 Michael 1970, 90–1. 49 Ibid., 283. 50 See Osselton and Osselton-Bleeker 1962 for early examples. See Johansson 1980 and Crystal 2010 for many more examples and comments. According to Quirk et al. (1985, 1333), this plural attributive construction “is on the increase.” 51 Johansson 1980, 67, 88, 92. 52 Cf. the list of “modifier” and other uses in Huddleston and Pullum 2002 (327). 53 Example from Johansson 1980 (93), referring to linguistic levels. 54 Cf. Bolinger 1967, 25. 55 Bauer 1998, 84. 56 The difference in stress patterns calls for further examination to see to what extent these reflect different parts of speech. 57 Warren 1978, 41–4. 58 Quirk et al. 1985, 1567. 59 Huddleston and Pullum 2002, 28. 60 Jespersen 1954, 137. In much the same vein, Huddleston and Pullum (2002, 448–51) discuss the distinction between “composite nominal” and “morphological compound nouns,” a distinction not recognized by the critic who claims that “formations such as bus station … are traditionally analysed as compounds.” 61 Kid power in the sense of ‘the spending potential of children’ as in The Fourth Annual Kid Power Marketing Conference. In view of the analysis in terms of case provided in the present essay, my former interpretation of kid as “grammaticized as an adjective” (Hirtle 2009a, 62) is faulty. 62 Which is not the same as in my kid brother, where the lexeme kid, actualized in the sense of ‘younger,’ is configured as an adjective and attributed to brother. That is, like the lexemes of toy and criminal discussed above, kid can be formed as a substantive with its own spatial support or as an adjective expressing a quality whose spatial support is found in the substantive it is incident to. 63 Johansson 1980, 36, 37. See Bell 2012 for other such examples and discussion.

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Notes to pages 103–12

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64 There appears to be no limit to what can go into an attributive noun phrase. The following is from a personal letter: “Today is a rough one because my joints are aching so much. I have had a swollen and very sore to walk, do stairs, roll to either side, ankle for over a month and had it xrayed and the G P says nothing is wrong with it … I wish it was his ankle then!” And the following from a blog on the internet: “[It was] the beginning of an I-read-too-much-into-everything-and-ruin-everyone’s-funbecause-that’s-what-I’m-paid-to-do-and-I-like-it-that-way academic fit.” 65 Allen 1997, 111. 66 Rosenbach 2002, 208. 67 Fischer 2008, 229. 68 Taylor 1996, 125. 69 Ibid., 137. Taylor here summarizes Hudson’s similar view on this point. 70 Börjars et al. 2013, 123. 71 There seems to be little agreement on terms (clitic, special clitic, enclitic, phrasal affix, edge affix) but all imply that the -’s does express a syntactic relationship. 72 Anderson 2013, 193. 73 Huddleston and Pullum 2002, 481. 74 Hudson 2013, 174. 75 Cf. Langacker 2013, 84n. No attempt is made here to bring in the characterizing use of -’s (this old people’s home) discussed in Taylor (1996, 287–94) and mentioned in Hirtle 2009a (312–14). 76 Huddleston and Pullum 2002, 448. chapter seven

1 See Guillaume 1992, 114–20. Guillaume’s description might serve as inspiration for German grammarians to adopt the term Raumwort (“space word”) as a more transparent way of referring to the noun than the current term Substantiv. 2 For discussion, see Hirtle 2013, ch. 4 to 6. 3 In a vocative use such as Someone open the window please! the pronoun appears to be in the second person. 4 See Duffley 1996/1997. 5 Guillaume 2007, 409. 6 Guillaume 1990, 109. 7 For languages with a full conjugation, ordinal person is represented within the verb. Cf. Guillaume 1998, 41–2. 8 Duffley 2006, 161. 9 For these and other such matters concerning the verb, see Hirtle 2007b.

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Notes to pages 114–23

10 See Duffley 2002 for an insightful discussion of the French infinitive from this point of view. 11 Some would argue that me in the above example is a subject, but this disregards the case of the pronoun, which appears to indicate that the syntactic relation with the event is quite different. See Duffley 2014 for a detailed study of “control” usage in English. 12 Examples from Huddleston and Pullum 2002, 80. 13 Duffley 2006 discusses usage in detail. He characterizes -ing as “adjectivelike” in the progressive. The proposal made here of a temporal support for all verbs helps bring out in what way it differs from an adjective. 14 This even applies to ambient it as in It’s raining. See Hirtle 2009a, 321–3, and Essay 4 on person, above. 15 For transitivity, see Duffley’s discussion (2006, 162–5) from the point of view of “event-conditionee” and “event-originator.” For control, see his 2014 study. chapter eight

  1 Guillaume 2003, 131.   2 Briefly, the observation that first person and second person, like third person, talk about someone or something. This person underlying the three ordinal persons and representing the space occupied by what is talked about, Guillaume called “cardinal person,” though he sometimes called it “third person” (as in the above citation).   3 See my Lessons on the English Verb (Hirtle 2007b), 145–66.   4 Jespersen 1954, VII, 125; Quirk et al. 1985, 347.   5 As described in a preceding essay. See also my Lessons on the Noun Phrase (Hirtle 2009a), 53–67, 358–67.   6 See Hirtle 2009a, 126–46.   7 See ibid., 332–61.   8 Michael 1970, 70–2, 324.   9 Wales 1996, 21; Quirk et al. 1985, 75–7; Huddleston and Pullum 2002, 22. 10 Guillaume 2009, 251–2. 11 Guillaume 1997, 193. 12 Taylor 1996, 17. 13 See Hirtle 2009a, 234–91. 14 Guillaume 1992, 253. 15 The term ideogenesis to designate the process of calling to mind the particularizing component of a pronoun’s abstract meaning import is hardly

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Notes to pages 123–36

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appropriate because of its association with the lexeme. When this process is better understood in pronouns, a more appropriate term may be found. 16 Guillaume 1999, 129. 17 Guillaume 1987, 249. 18 Guillaume 2009, 177; 1992, 115. 19 Guillaume 1987, 243. 20 Ibid., 236. 21 Cf. Quirk et al. 1985, 339. 22 See Hirtle 2009a, 302–15, for a discussion of the -’s suffix and the “possessive” relationship. 23 Historically the dative. Cf. o ed , s.v. “herself,” etc. 24 Lyons 1977, 640. 25 To distinguish between the personal experience of oneself and the linguistic representation of it, the latter is written with a capital letter, Self. 26 Guillaume 1987, 183. 27 Except in legal documents, I, the undersigned …, where the person signing is not the writer of the document. 28 Urban 1989, 34, 37. 29 Wales 1996, 147. 30 A proposal to be considered in relation with metaphorical uses of proper nouns, as discussed in Hirtle 2013, ch. 14. 31 Wales 1996, 206. 32 Cf. Guillaume 1987, 225. 33 Duffley 2006, 161. 34 Huddleston and Pullum 2002, 463–4. 35 As suggested by Bread and butter is nourishing vs. Bread and butter are nourishing. See Hirtle 2007b, 155. 36 See Jespersen 1954, VII, 227–40. 37 Huddleston and Pullum 2002, 1468. 38 Bolinger 1979, 204. 39 Huddleston and Pullum 2002, 1468. 40 Whitley 1978, 19. 41 Quirk et al. 1985, 353. 42 This does not of course make it an “impersonal” pronoun, a homonym of “personal” you, as Whitley (1978) maintains. 43 As in the example of Nurse! above. Cf. Quirk et al. 1985, 773–5. 44 Bolinger 1977, 84. 45 Huddleston and Pullum 2002, 374, 353n14, 522. 46 Cf. Wales 1996, 11. 47 Boas and Powell 1911, 35; Jespersen 1954, II, 84; Lyons 1968, 277.

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Notes to pages 136–43

48 Huddleston and Pullum 2002, 1465. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid., 1466. 51 Quirk et al. 1985, 354; Bolinger 1979, 209, 205. 52 Quirk et al. 1985, 350–1. 53 Huddleston and Pullum 2002, 1467. 54 Quirk et al. 1985, 350. 55 Huddleston and Pullum 2002, 1467. 56 Wales 1996, 59. 57 Whether an internal or an external plural remains to be determined here, and for you and they. (See Hirtle 2009a, 96–104, for the distinction.) 58 Huddleston and Pullum 2002, 374. 59 For the discussion of determiners as pronouns, see Hirtle 2009a, 292–301. 60 If this analysis of we as determiner proves valid, it would seem to entail that the substantive incident to it, supporters, is used in the first person, a question that cannot be pursued here. 61 Quirk et al. 1985, 339. 62 Lyons 1977, 638. 63 Benveniste 1966, 256, my translation. 64 To be recalled here is that in English the terms “animate” vs. “inanimate” are not to be taken in the sense of living vs. non-living entities, but rather in the sense of entities distinguished by subgender (feminine or masculine), humans for the most part, as opposed to those not distinguished for subgender. As we shall see, this allows for uses depicting entities momentarily perceived as in some respect assimilable to the human, and even uses for humans perceived as in some respect outside the human sphere. 65 See Wales 1996, 112–19, for a discussion of how traditional usage is being challenged. 66 Huddleston and Pullum 2002, 1457. 67 Ibid., 1472; Lyons 1977, 660. In this way we can avoid the pitfall pointed out by Wiese (1983, 375): “an approach which takes coreference as basic must fail if coreference is presumed to be an ‘intralinguistic’ relation that can be described without recourse to considerations of extralinguistic reference.” 68 Huddleston and Pullum 2002, 1472, 1457. 69 Wales 1996, 5. 70 The terms “refer,” “reference,” and “referent” can of course be used quite properly by logicians, judges, psychologists, parents, etc. to designate the relation between what someone says and reality outside the speaker’s mind since they are concerned with whether that person is speaking the truth.

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Notes to pages 143–58

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71 Wales 1996, 49. 72 Quirk et al. 1985, 348. 73 Ibid., 749. 74 Ibid., 1391. 75 Ibid., 1393. 76 Cf. the discussion in Bolinger 1977, 71–4. 77 Ibid., 68–70. 78 Wales 1996, 48. 79 Quirk et al. 1985, 1392. 80 Ibid., 348–9. 81 Cited in Bolinger 1977, 78. 82 Quirk et al. 1985, 348. 83 Ibid, 349. 84 Ibid., 1392. 85 Cf. Wales 1996, 159. 86 Bolinger 1977, 82; Wales 1996, 47–8. 87 Cf. Quirk et al. 1985, 349n, 736n; Huddleston and Pullum 2002, 1483. 88 Schibsbye 1973, 191. 89 Huddleston and Pullum 2002, 1379. 90 Bolinger 1977, 87. 91 Kipling 1899, 110. 92 Cf. Guillaume 1992, 77. 93 See Wales 1996, 21–49, for an extensive discussion of such approaches. 94 Hirtle 2009a, 132–46. 95 Huddleston and Pullum 2002, 488. 96 Ibid., 489. 97 Wales 1996, 165. 98 Ibid., 159–61. 99 Ibid., 160. 100 Erades 1956, 4. 101 Joly 1975, 262. 102 Jespersen 1954, VII, 130. 103 Parents would hardly refer to their own infant as it, presumably because they do try to establish communication by means of baby-talk. 104 Siemund 2008, 125. 105 See Hirtle 2009a (332–47) for more examples and discussion. To my knowl­edge, the most complete study of the question is to be found in the unpublished thesis of Lori Morris. Some of the above examples are drawn from that study. 106 Wales 1996, 141.

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Notes to pages 158–69

107 Cf. ibid., 146–8. 108 Ibid., 59. In Wales, the expression “generic he” refers to epicene uses. 109 Quirk et al. 1985, 352. 110 Ibid., 353. 111 Haldane 1987, 36. 112 Quirk et al. 1985, 353. 113 Wales 1996, 54. 114 The example, from Joanne Baker, 50 Physics Ideas You Really Need to Know (London: Quercus, 2007), 161, was provided by Toby Griffin (personal communication). See Wales (1996, 125–33) for a more extensive discussion of epicene they. 115 See the discussion in Hirtle 2009a, 358–67. 116 Wales 1996, 12. 117 Jespersen 1954, II, 399. 118 Quirk et al. 1985, 386. 119 Ibid., 387; Kruisinga 1932, 286–9, 130; Bolinger 1991, 225–6; Wales 1996, 80, 59; Huddleston and Pullum 2002, 426–7. 120 Huddleston and Pullum 2002, 426. 121 Wales 1996, 59. 122 Ibid., 80–4. 123 Ibid., 59. 124 Huddleston and Pullum 2002, 427. 125 Quirk et al. 1985, 387. As Wales points out in an earlier discussion of “one’s generalizing nature” (1980, 106), “[t]he more clearly and definitely a sentiment is understood to be related to the speaker alone, the more egocentric the pronoun will appear to be … Without a context, these are by no means unambiguous in reference.” 126 Huddleston and Pullum 2002, 555. They later (1462–3) consider it a “pronominal” with an “antecedent … of the nominal category.” 127 Ibid., 904, 1048–9. 128 Hirtle 2009a, 126–46, 332–47. 129 Guillaume 2009, 242. 130 Guillaume 1992, 65. 131 Quirk et al. 1985, 317. 132 Huddleston and Pullum 2002, 488–9. 133 Quirk et al. 1985, 318. 134 Cf. Wales 1996, 146–52. 135 Ibid., 146. 136 Jespersen 1924, 218. 137 Siemund 2008, 3.

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Notes to pages 170–9

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138 Guillaume 1999, 23. As opposed to the “fictive” gender of French, opposing la chaise and le fauteuil. 139 Ibid., 37, 25–6. To be kept in mind here is Guillaume’s theory of grammatical number, whereby the representation of a single entity can be obtained only by reducing an internal plurality to a singular. Held up just before it reaches the singular, this reductive operation gives the representation of two entities, a dual, whence the possibility of the two types of dual, antonymous and homonymous. Guillaume sees the masculine and feminine animate genders as being drawn from a duality conjoining two different natures, while the neuter inanimate is derived as a singular nature common to two (or more) entities. Gender thus has to do with the nature of a singular entity with respect to a second entity; number abstracts away from the nature of the entities that it numerates. For a view of the system of number in English, see Hirtle 2009a (68–88). 140 Guillaume 1999, 38; 1990, 63. 141 Outside of who/whom, but with “whom relegated to a very limited province which did not properly belong to it,” according to Jespersen (1954, VII, 274). 142 See Hirtle 2009a, 358–67. 143 Jespersen 1954, VII, 274. 144 Ibid., 237–8. 145 The expression intended designatum is introduced here to keep the focus on the speaker, who constructs a pronoun or substantive in such a way that it will, once constructed and expressed, designate what it represents in the intended message – that is, refer to it. 146 Guillaume 2003, 131. 147 “le fait primordial de la séparation du Moi et du Hors-Moi” (2005, 405). 148 Boas and Powell 1991, 35. 149 Humboldt 1988, 95. 150 Hors-Moi is translated literally as “Beyond-Self” rather than the less cumbersome “not-self” or “non-self” in order to bring out the spatial relationship underlying Guillaume’s view of person. 151 This appears to correspond to the following description by a brain scientist: “Via my left brain language center’s ability to say, ‘I am,’ I become an independent entity separate from the eternal flow. As such, I become a single, a solid, separate from the whole.” (Taylor 2006, 142.) 152 Guillaume 2010, 253, 200. 153 Guillaume had first introduced into his teaching this binary tensor only four months earlier, applying it to the article and number (2010, 5, 27), but apparently had not yet envisaged its application elsewhere.

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Notes to pages 180–200

154 Guillaume 1987, 182. Here we touch on the view frequently expressed by specialists in various disciplines that the mental capacity to learn and use a language is inherent in human beings. 155 Guillaume 2010, 206–7. 156 To be noted here is that I have taken for granted the capacity to depict or represent mentally something already present in one’s experience. The human capacity to represent an experience and symbolize it – give it a sign (cf. Hirtle 2009b) – which underlies human language is obviously related to the capacity of distinguishing one’s Self, but to discuss this relationship here would lead us too far afield. 157 Guillaume 2010, 200. 158 Guillaume 2009, 177; 1992, 115. 159 Guillaume 2010, 200. 160 Guillaume 1984, 24–5, 43–4. 161 Guillaume 2010, 175. 162 The terms “personne logique” and elsewhere “personne objective” I translate as “cardinal person,” the expression he had adopted earlier. 163 Guillaume 1987, 236. 164 Guillaume 2010, 200. 165 Ibid. 166 Wales 1996, 59, 63. 167 Huddleston and Pullum 2002, 1465. 168 Ibid., 1466. 169 Wales 1996, 54. 170 Bolinger 1977, 87. 171 Cf. Hirtle 2009a, 70–121. 172 See Hirtle 2013. 173 Cited in Guillaume 1972, 17. concluding thoughts

1 Guillaume 1973, 261–2. 2 “Dans le monde vivant, les formes ne sont jamais aussi parfaites et idéales que dans une figure géométrique. Car la nature est dans un fragile équilibre.” Dumont 2014, 7, my translation.

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Langacker, Ronald W. 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, vol. I. Stanford, c a : Stanford University Press. – 2013. Essentials of Cognitive Grammar. Oxford, uk : Oxford University Press. Lowe, Ronald. 2007. Introduction à la psychomécanique du langage: I Psychosystématique du nom. Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval. Lyons, John. 1968. Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. – 1977. Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Michael, Ian. 1970. English Grammatical Categories and the Tradition to 1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Miller, George A. 1991. The Science of Words. New York: Scientific American Library. Morris, Lori. 1991. “Gender in Modern English: The System and Its Uses.” PhD thesis. Quebec: Université Laval. Osselton, N.E., and C.J. Osselton-Bleeker. 1962. “The Plural Attributive in Contemporary English.” English Studies 43 (6): 476–84. Paradis, Carita. 2001. “Adjectives and Boundedness.” Cognitive Linguistics 12 (1): 47–65. Penfield, W. 1966. “Speech, Perception and the Uncommitted Cortex.” In Brain and Conscious Experience, edited by John C. Eccles, 217–37. New York: Springer-Verlag New York Inc. Quirk, R., S. Greenbaum, G. Leech, and J. Svartvik. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman. Reid, Wallis. 1991. Verb and Noun Number in English: A Functional Exploration. London and New York: Longman. Rijkhoff, J. 2002. The Noun Phrase. Oxford, uk : Oxford University Press. Rizzolatti, Giacomo, and Laila Craighero. 2004. “The Mirror-Neuron System.” Annual Review of Neuroscience 27: 169–92. Roey, J. van. 1964. “A Note on Noun + Noun Combinations in Modern English.” English Studies 45 (1): 48–52. Rosenbach, Anette. 2002. Genitive Variation in English. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Ryder, Mary Ellen. 1994. Ordered Chaos: The Interpretation of English NounNoun Compounds. Berkeley, c a: University of California Press. Sapir, Edward. 1921. Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World. Saussure, Ferdinand. 1916 [1955]. Cours de linguistique générale. Paris: Payot. Schibsbye, Knud. 1973. A Modern English Grammar, 2nd ed. London: Oxford University Press.

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Index

activity, vs state, 110 adjective, 27–8, 53–6, 59, 71, 78–9, 80, 82, 114; used as noun, 82–6 adposition, 88 adverb, 27–8, 30, 56–7, 58, 59, 79– 80, 82–6, 102, 109, 116; of discourse, 62 agreement, 78–9, 109 analytical case. See case anaphora, 153 animals, pronouns for, 154–6, 158 animate gender. See gender antecedents, 52, 141–2, 144 apposition, 88, 94, 135–6, 140 article, 43–4, 50–1, 64, 73–4. See also determiner aspect, 90, 110–12 attributive noun phrase, 95–105, 217n64 auxiliary, 110, 113, 115 beyond speaking relationship. See third person Beyond-Self, 67–72, 165, 177–82, 184–8, 190, 194–5 binary tensor. See radical binary tensor

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biolinguistic perspective, 5 body-mind question, 3, 10–12 cardinal person, 41–67, 73, 77, 81– 2, 108, 110–15, 121, 127, 172, 182–3, 192, 196; incorporated into lexeme, 123; basis of personal pronoun system, 151–2, 182. See also person case, 74, 87–106, 152–3, 171–2, 173; analytical, 123; common, 87, 117; genitive, 87, 89, 97, 104; import, 90–5, 99, 100, 102, 103, 104, 130–1, 162; morphological expression of, 88–9; oblique, 100, 171; support, 90, 95, 99, 104, 130–1, 162; synthetic, 90, 117, 122–3, 134, 173 cataphora, 153 classifying-type attributives, 101 clauses, 31 clitics, 89, 104, 105 common case. See case common / proper noun distinction, 76 completive pronoun. See deter­miner

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234 Index

compounds, 96–7, 101–2; higherorder, 215n41 comprehension / extension relation, 42, 76–7 conjunctions, 30, 60; coordinating, 131 consignification, 21, 27 coreference, 52, 142–7, 150 count noun. See noun declension, 74, 76, 105, 130. See also case; pronoun deictics, 49, 64–5 demonstratives, 49, 64–5, 125 designatum, 117, 154, 172 determiner, 43, 49, 65, 73, 126, 140, 143–4; they as, 162, 173; we as, 140, 173; you as, 135–6, 173 diastematic element, 60 direct object. See event-conditionee duration, 110 -ed inflection, 110 -ed participle, 115 empathy, 138 empty subject. See it enclitic, 89, 103 endophoric reference, 153 epicene. See gender event. See happening event-conditionee, 92, 112 event-originator, 91–2, 112 exophoric reference, 153 exo-semantic person. See person expression, 39 extension, 44, 50, 54, 64, 71, 76–7, 85, 115, 173, 176, 182 extensity, 43–4, 46, 48, 64, 73, 74, 76–7, 79, 81–2, 84, 100–1, 134,

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139, 144, 149, 152, 173–4, 176, 192, 194 external incidence. See incidence feminine. See gender finite verb. See verb first person, 34, 117, 125–9, 185; plural, 136–7, 187. See also I; we French, 78, 90, 99, 116, 119–20 function. See syntactic: function gender, 27, 67, 76, 78, 85, 90, 117, 123, 126, 132, 139, 141, 151, 153–6, 158, 162, 166–9, 173, 175–6, 189, 197; animate, 152– 3, 154–5, 156, 157, 158, 173, 189–90, 191, 192; epicene, 132, 154, 161–2; feminine, 167; ­gender-number connection, 162, 170; inanimate, 156, 191; masculine, 167; subgender, 167– 9, 192–3 generalization, 69, 179 generalized exophora, 159 generalized person. See person generic uses: of he, 158; of one, 163–5; of we, 164; of you, 164 genitive case. See case gerundial -ing form, 114 grammatical meaning, 27, 40 happening, 110–12 he, 153–60, 191–3. See also third person head, phrasal, 78 humans, pronouns for, 156, 170. See also gender: epicene; it: dehumanization; pronoun I, 128–32. See also first person

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Index 235

identifying-type attributives, 101 ideogenesis, 29–30, 50, 85, 122, 176, 196 import case. See case import / support relation, 36, 37, 40, 43, 53–4, 71, 73, 82, 91, 106, 115 inanimate gender. See gender incidence, 40, 53, 60–2, 81, 114; external, 85, 99, 105–6, 115; external first-degree, 54, 78, 80, 82; external second-degree, 54, 56, 80, 82; internal, 42–4, 46, 54, 77, 80, 85, 99, 105–6, 111, 115, 123; referential, 40, 49, 52–3, 57–8, 63, 66, 73, 91, 95, 121; syntactic, 40, 49, 53, 57–8, 63, 73 indefinite personal pronoun. See pronoun indicative mood. See mood indirect object, 92 individuation, 169, 170 Indo-European languages, 90, 207n2 infants, pronouns for, 156, 169, 221n103 infinitive, 70, 110–11, 113–14 inflection, 90 intended message, 5–6, 10, 11, 37– 8, 52, 63, 73, 124, 143, 150, 184 interjection, 30, 79 internal incidence. See incidence interrogative pronouns, 166 it, 141–53, 156–60, 188–93, 195–6; ambient, 148; anticipatory, 51, 146–7; dehumanization, 156; dummy, 141, 145; empty subject, 147–8; idiomatic, 149–50; neuter, 152; reference to whole sentences, 145. See also third person

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Latin, 47, 76, 89, 97–8, 109 lexeme, 24–5, 27–9, 36, 39–40, 42, 44–6, 50, 52, 53–4, 58, 71– 2, 77, 78–9, 90, 122–4, 154–5, 167 lexical import. See comprehension lexicalization, 96–7 Man / Man confrontation, 116, 172 masculine. See gender mass noun. See noun mass / count distinction, 46, 76 minimum free form, 18, 21–2, 30 mixed person. See person mockery, 138–9, 156 modal auxiliaries, 46, 110 mood, 90, 110–11; indicative, 46, 110; quasi-nominal, 111; subjunctive, 46, 109–10 morphogenesis, 29, 77, 85, 122, 176, 196 morphological case. See case morphology, 108 negative person. See person neuter. See it non-finite verb form. See verb non-ordinal person. See person non-past indicative. See mood non-person, 141 non-predicative part of speech. See part of speech noun, 83–4, 88, 102; attributive, 87, 98–100, 105; count, 45, 77; mass, 45, 77; proper, 45. See also substantive noun phrase, 18, 44, 73, 78, 81, 88, 104–5, 131; in adverbial function, 87, 92–3; attributive, 95–7; predicative, 91

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236 Index

noun-noun construction, 95–7, 101 number, 46, 67, 76–8, 85, 90, 108, 123, 126, 139, 151, 153, 154, 162, 167, 173, 182, 190, 197 objects, pronouns for, 157 objectivity, 8 oblique case. See case Old English, 89, 103–4, 117, 171 one, 163–6. See also third person ordinal person. See person part of speech, 17, 18, 28–9, 40, 71, 75, 81–2; distinction from function, 83; non-predicative, 62, 121–2; predicative, 57, 116, 122 participant role, 182 participles, 70, 110–11, 113–15 particularization, 69–70, 122, 179, 184 parti-generic, 159 partitive quantifiers, 65, 122, 125 past indicative. See mood person, 18, 27, 33, 50, 54, 59, 60, 65, 67, 69–71, 73, 90, 108, 123, 181; agreement, 55; cardinal, 41–67, 73, 77, 81–2, 108, 110– 15, 121, 127, 172, 182–3, 192, 196; exo-semantic, 111; generalized, 18, 70; logical, 41; mixed, 187; negative, 54, 78; non-ordinal, 41; ordinal, 41, 46–7, 71–3, 108, 110–16, 127, 172, 182–3, 197. See also first person; second person; third person personal pronouns, resemblance to substantive, 198 personal space. See space

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personification, 155–6, 168, 170, 173 pets, pronouns for, 155 phrase, 31, 73–4. See also noun phrase plural, 25; noun used as adjective, 98–9; subject, 46. See also they ; we ; you polysemy, 197 position. See syntactic: position possessive. See case: genitive; pronoun predicate, 40 predicative: part of speech (see part of speech); noun phrase, 91 prepositions, 30, 54, 60–3, 92–4, 109 prepositional phrase: as adverb, 93; as subject, 63, 93–4 pre-science, 72 pro-forms, 120 progressive, 114 pronoun, 30, 34–5, 41, 50, 65, 73, 120–4, 144; completive (see determiner); indefinite, 163, 166, 172; interrogative, 123, 166; personal, 67, 87, 106, 126–8; possessive, 43, 65, 118, 125–6, 129–30; reflexive, 118, 127, 163; relative, 166; suppletive, 49, 126. See also he ; I ; it ; one ; she ; they ; we ; you pronoun-switching, 158, 164 prop uses, 147–8, 157 proper noun. See noun psychogenesis, 122 quasi-nominal mood. See mood radical binary tensor, 68, 179

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Index 237

range of representation. See extension reductionism, 12 reference, 8, 10, 34, 39, 40, 50, 91, 142–4 referential incidence. See incidence reflexive pronoun. See pronoun relative pronoun. See pronoun representation, 39, 50; exclusively by spatialization, 181 representational range. See extension rules of grammar, 30–1 -s inflection, 25–6, 87. See also case: genitive second person, 34, 117, 126, 132– 6, 152, 185–7 Self, 67, 69, 70, 72, 107, 128, 129, 136–7, 177, 180–1, 184, 194, 195 semiogenesis, 122 sentence, 31, 37–8, 76, 81, 91; mechanism of, 62 she, 153–60, 191–3. See also third person sign-meaning relationship, 12, 38 singular, 26; opposition with plural, 117. See also he ; I ; it; one ; she ; you some and any. See partitive quantifiers space, 47, 64–5, 72, 110–11; empty, 51; personal, 124, 184; space word, 108; spatialization, 41, 181; speaker’s, 184; substratum, 35 space-time matrix, 107, 112 Spanish, 47 spatial representation. See space

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spatial support, 47–8, 63, 79, 105, 111, 113 speaking relationship, 172–5, 195–6 speculative grammarians, 21 state, vs activity, 110 subgender. See gender subject, 40, 46–7, 112–13, 115 subjectivity, 8 subjunctive mood. See mood substantive, 29, 41, 42, 46, 54, 58– 9, 65–6, 71, 73, 75, 77–9, 80, 82, 83–4, 88–90, 101–2, 105, 107–8, 115, 116; used for direct address (see vocative); used without a determiner, 44–5 suppletive pronoun. See pronoun support case. See case support for meaning, 36–7, 44–5, 58–9, 60, 65, 77. See also import /  support relation syntactic: function, 31, 75; gap, 61– 3; position expressing function, 28, 88, 104 syntactic incidence. See incidence syntax, 15, 40 synthetic case. See case tense, 47, 90, 110–12, 115 they, 160–3. See also third person third person, 34, 70–1, 76, 109, 117, 126, 140–1, 144, 153, 172, 188–90; plural, 175, 197. See also he ; it ; one ; she ; they thought, inherently contrastive ­nature of, 181 time, 47, 72, 111; time word, 107 understood meaning / intended message relationship, 38

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238 Index

Universe / Man confrontation, 116, 172 verb, 29, 90, 116; compound, 113; finite, 109, 111–12, 115; non-­ finite, 112–13; not conjugated for ordinal person, 112; uninflected, 110 vocable, 207n2 vocative, 47, 88, 94 voice, 112

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we, 136–40, 187–8; inclusive /  exclusive distinction, 137, 187– 8; royal, 137; scholarly, 137. See also first person word, 90 you, 132–6, 185–7; dependent position in speaking relationship, 132–3, 152. See also second person

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