Page 23 The term dialect also has quite a different use. When applied to languages such as Russian, German, or Italian, the term in current use implies a judgment of value: dialects are contrasted with a national languagefor example, German has different dialects, but there is a form of German that is not a dialect but a language. There are Germans who do not speak any German dialect but the German language. In this sense, dialects are contrasted with a language not as particular forms of a linguistic system with its general form but as particular forms with a particular form that is accepted nationwide. Dialects arise as a result of a decrease in the frequency and intimacy of contact between various sections of the population separated from one another by different geographical localization. But the diminution of the frequency and intimacy of contact may be a result of a social and ethnic stratification of a linguistic community. Therefore, it is appropriate to use the term dialect to distinguish not only varieties of a language in space but also varieties conditioned by a social and ethnic stratification of a linguistic community. In current linguistic literature, the terms social dialect ( sociolect ) and ethnic dialect are used in this sense. Examples of social and ethnic dialects are the working-class dialect in England (cockney) and black English in the United States. Dialects of a language can be viewed not only in synchronic but also in diachronic perspective. If we combine the space perspective with the time perspective, we can distinguish four types of linguistic systems reflecting different kinds of abstraction from time or space: 1) 2) 3) 4)
a a a a
linguistic linguistic linguistic linguistic
system system system system
with with with with
time time time both
and space excluded (monochronic monotopic linguistic system); excluded and space included (monochronic polytopic linguistic system); included and space excluded ( polychronic monotopic linguistic system); and time and space included ( polychronic polytopic linguistic system).
The first and second types of linguistic systems relate to synchronic linguistics, and the third and fourth types of linguistic systems relate to diachronic linguistics. In this book I will deal exclusively with the first type. 8. The Semiotic versus Generativist Notion of Language Noam Chomsky, the founder of a linguistic theory called generative -transformational grammar, once defined language as follows: From now on I will consider a language to be a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out of a finite set of elements. (Chomsky, 1957:12)
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Page 24 Defining the goals of linguistic theory, he wrote: The fundamental aim in the linguistic analysis of a language L is to separate the grammatical sequences which are the sentences of L from the ungrammatical sequences which are not sentences of L and to study the structure of grammatical sentences. (Chomsky, 1957: 12) Furthermore, Chomsky defined the grammar of a language as follows: The grammar of L will thus be a device that generates all of the grammatical sequences of L and none of the ungrammatical ones. (Chomsky, 1957: 12) What strikes one in these definitions of language and grammar is Chomsky's complete disregard of the fact that language is a sign system. As a supposedly superior alternative to the semiotic notion of language as a sign system, Chomsky suggested a notion of language as a set of sentences. As an alternative to the notion of grammar as a system of rules that constitutes an integral part of language, Chomsky suggested a notion of grammar that is not a part of language but is an external device for generating a language understood as a set of sentences. Let us not argue about definitions. After all, every linguist, like every other scientist, has the right to define his terms in his own way. What matters is not definitions in themselves but the empirical consequences of such definitions. So, let us consider the empirical consequences of Chomsky's notions of language and grammar. If we accept the notion of language as a sign system, we cannot investigate grammar independently of meaning, because linguistic units are signs, and a sign as a member of the binary relation 'sign of' cannot be separated from its meaning. A sign separated from its meaning is no longer a sign but merely a sequence of soundsa purely physical phenomenon. If, on the other hand, we do not include the notion of the sign in the definition of language and base this definition on some other set of notions, as Chomsky used to do, then we are free to consider grammar to be independent of meaning. According to Chomsky, ''grammar is autonomous and independent of meaning" (Chomsky, 1957: 17). As a special case, he considered syntax to be an autonomous component of grammar distinct from semantics. To support his claim that the notion 'grammatical' cannot be identified with 'meaningful', Chomsky devised an example of a sentence that was allegedly nonsensical but grammatically correct: Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. As a matter of fact, the nonsensical content of this sentence has no bearing on the question of whether or not its grammatical structure is meaningful. Chomsky confounded the notion of grammatical meaning with the notion of lexical mean-
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Page 25 ing . But we must distinguish between lexical meaning and grammatical meaning. No matter whether or not from the standpoint of lexical meaning a sentence is nonsensical, if the sentence is grammatically correct, it is grammatically meaningful. So, the above sentence contains the following grammatical meanings: the noun ideas signifies a set of objects, the verb sleep signifies a state ideas are in, the adverb furiously signifies the property of sleep, and the adjectives colorless and green signify two different properties of ideas. Grammatical meanings are categorial meanings, that is, the most general meanings characterizing classes of words and other linguistic units. If this sentence did not have grammatical meanings, we could not even decide whether it is nonsensical or not. We consider this sentence nonsensical because of the conflict between the grammatical and lexical meanings: the grammatical meanings of the adjectives colorless and green and the verb sleep assign contradictory properties and a highly unlikely state to the object denoted by the nounideas; the adverb furiously assigns a strange property to a state denoted by the verb sleep. Compare the following expressions:
The meaning of (2) is nonsensical, because the grammatical, that is, categorial, meanings of its words conflict with the lexical meanings: the grammatical meaning of round assigns a contradictory property to the object denoted by the noun quadrangle. Expression (1) makes sense, because its lexical and grammatical meanings are in keeping with each other. Consider the following verses from Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll: 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. Do these verses make sense? Yes, of course, they do, for although they contain made-up nonsense words created by Lewis Carroll, we understand that did gyre and gimble signifies some actions in the past, in the wabe signifies a localization in some object, slithy signifies a property of the set of objects called toves, etc. What, then, are grammatical meanings? Grammatical meanings are morphological and syntactic categories. These categories are represented in the above verses by the plural suffix - s, the preposition in, the auxiliary verbs did and were, the conjunction and , the article the, and the word order. Affixes, prepositions, conjunctions, etc. all have meaning because they are signs, and signs presuppose meaning. The notion of the meaningless sign is no better than the notion of the round quadrangle.
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Page 26 An analysis of a sentence into immediate constituents is impossible without an analysis of meaning. Consider the sentence
This sentence admits of two analyses into immediate constituents:
We can analyze these two sentences differently because they have two different grammatical meanings. Let us now have one possible complete analysis of sentence (3) into its immediate constituents:
If we disregard the meaning of (3), (6) is not the only possible way of analyzing (3) into immediate constituents. We could have constituents such as
An analysis of a sentence into immediate constituents without an analysis of the meaning of the sentence admits of any arbitrary bracketing. Why do we not analyze the sentence as shown in (7)? Because this analysis contradicts the semantic connections between words. Any analysis of phrases into immediate constituents presupposes an analysis of semantic connections between words. A syntactic analysis presupposes a semantic analysis. It is clear from the foregoing that an autonomous grammar independent of a semantic analysis is impossible unless we are resigned to doing a sort of hocus-pocus linguistics. Here a further question arises: How did Chomsky manage to avoid unacceptable constituents, such as (mother of ) or (of the) in the above example? He did the trick by tacitly smuggling an analysis of meaning into an analysis of immediate constituents. But, smuggling semantic analysis into syntax cannot be an adequate substitute for a straightforward, consistent analysis of meaning as a part of syntax. It should be noted that in the first version of generative-transformational grammar (1957), Chomsky was not concerned about semantics at all. However, he introduced a semantic component into the second version of his grammar (1965). That did not mean a change of his conception of an autonomous grammar independent of meaning: his grammar remained autonomous because the
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Page 27 semantic component was conceived of as a component interpreting syntactic structures established independently of meaning. Clearly, the perverse idea that syntactic structures can be established without recourse to an analysis of meaning has persisted in all versions of generative-transformational grammar. As a matter of fact, Chomsky inherited the idea of autonomous grammar from the distributionally oriented type of American structuralism, in particular from the works of his teacher Zellig S. Harris, who was concerned in grammatical description primarily with specifying patterns of occurrence and cooccurrence of elements. Harris worked without reference to meaning. His aim was to develop a method for representing grammatical structures of sentences without reference to semantic criteria; it was assumed that semantic statements would follow from purely formal syntax constructed independently of meaning. Generative-transformational grammar is essentially a recasting of American distributional structuralism into a formal system. The new idea introduced by Chomsky was generation. He declared that structuralism was merely taxonomic, and he opposed his generative system to it as an explanatory model. In order to evaluate the methodological significance of the notion of generation, let us consider some other important notions used in Chomsky's works. One fundamental factor involved in a speaker-hearer's performance is his knowledge of grammar. This mostly unconscious knowledge is referred to as competence. Competence is distinct from performance. Performance is what the speaker-hearer actually does; it is based not only on his knowledge of language but also on many other factorsmemory restrictions, distraction, inattention, nonlinguistic knowledge, beliefs, etc. Chomsky uses the term grammar in two senses: 1) on the one hand, the term is used to refer to the system of rules in the mind of the speaker-hearer, a system that is normally acquired in early childhood; 2) on the other hand, it is used to refer to the theory that the linguist constructs as a hypothesis concerning the actual internalized grammar of the speaker-hearer. Grammar in the sense of a linguistic theory is called a hypothesis, because the internalized grammar in the mind of the speakerhearer is not available for immediate observation. Chomsky assumes that the grammar in the speaker-hearer's mind is not an ordinary grammar but a generative grammar. He constructs his theoretical generative grammar as a hypothesis about the real grammar in the speaker-hearer's mind. Chomsky assumes further that since the generative grammar in the speaker-hearer's mind is not available for immediate observation, the only way to draw conclusions about it is from the results of its activity, that is, from the properties of the set of sentences it has generated. Under this assumption, only those aspects of a generative grammar in the speaker-hearer's mind are relevant that cause generation of a particular set of sentences under consideration. By analyzing all available sentences produced by this allegedly "generative"
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Page iv Disclaimer: This book contains characters with diacritics. When the characters can be represented using the ISO 8859-1 character set (http://www.w3.org/TR/images/latin1.gif), netLibrary will represent them as they appear in the original text, and most computers will be able to show the full characters correctly. In order to keep the text searchable and readable on most computers, characters with diacritics that are not part of the ISO 8859-1 list will be represented without their diacritical marks. © 1987 by Sebastian Shaumyan All rights reserved No part of this book boo k may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses' Resolution o n Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Shaumyan, Sebastian. A semiotic theory of language. (Advances in semiotics series) Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Applicative grammar. 2. Semiotics. 3. Linguistics Methodology. I. Title. II. Series. P164.s5 1987 401'.41 85-46033 ISBN 0-253-30472-5 1 2 3 4 5 91 90 89 88 87
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Page 28 grammar in the speaker-hearer's mind, Chomsky constructs his theoretical generative grammar, which serves as a hypothesis about the generative grammar in the speaker-hearer's mind. Since only those aspects of generative grammar in the speakerhearer's mind are considered relevant that cause it to generate a set of sentences, the only thing that is required from theoretical generative grammar is a capacity for generation of the same set of sentences that is available for immediate observation. To verify a theoretical generative grammar therefore means to establish that it is capable of producing this set of sentences. The idea of a theoretical generative grammar as a hypothesis about the generative grammar in the speaker-hearer's mind looks very attractive, but it is actually a mistaken idea. If nothing is required of a theoretical generative grammar except that it generate correct sentences for a given language, then it must be considered unverifiable as a hypothesis about the real grammar in the speaker-hearer's mind. But what is wrong with generative grammar as a theoretical hypothesis? Generative grammar aims at constructing a mathematically consistent system of formal rules. But mathematical consistency does not guarantee a correct description of reality. Using a mathematical formalism, we can posit a system of rules for deriving sentences from certain basic linguistic objects. Granted that these rules work, does it mean that they present a reasonable model of the real rules of a language we are describing? No, it does not. From the fact that a mathematical design works, one cannot, conclude that language works in the same way. Real rules of real language are empirical dependencies between truly basic linguistic objects and sentences that are derived from them because of an empirical necessity. But empirical necessity should not be confused with logical necessity. In accordance with the laws of logic, true statements can be logically necessary consequences of both true and false statements. Let me illustrate that with two examples. We can deduce the true statement Butterflies fly from two false statements by constructing the following syllogism:
In accordance with the rules of logic, the deduction of (3) from (1) and (2) is a logical necessity. But the logically necessary connection between (1) and (2), on the one hand, and (3), on the other hand, conflicts with empirical necessity. Another example: Suppose we construct a calculus in which we posit some false initial statements such as 2=5, 3=7 , and so on. Suppose, further, that this calculus has the following derivation rule: If x=y, then x can be substituted for y and y can be substituted for x. By applying this rule, we can derive true statements from the initial false statements, for example: 2=2, 3=3, 5=5, 7=7 , and so on. The logically necessary connection between these true statements and
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