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LSA LI 2017 – Lecture # 6. 24 VII 17

CATEGORIALITY. in-and-around linguistic structure and discursive practice: from the phonologico-phonetic model to views of grammatical categoriality. Formal (distributional) categories in grammar, cross-linguistic comparison, and the identification of denotational domains coded in grammatical (including lexical) form.

What do we know about the universe? And why? In particular, what are the categories

of knowledge, the principles by which we recognize phenomena – for example phenomena of

perception – and by which we imagine things and situations in imaginary universes? How much

of that knowledge is somehow reflected in, or reflects, language and/or discourse? How, then,

do we communicate and share that knowledge? How much of the knowledge that language

codes is universal in some sense and how much is socio-historically specific? Recall here what a

wine connoisseur “knows” about the aesthetically relevant dimensions or characteristics of wine,

wine’s qualia that can be labeled and communicated in a tasting note, for example; does the

average member of the language community have such knowledge? [Slide 1] Recall, too, how

we can translate – or project from – what Ms. C answers to Mr. A’s professions of utter

ignorance about her School of Social Work in the form of a diagram of a complex structure of

taxonomies, partonomies, and serial structures in terms of which a student at that school

positions herself or himself in respect of curriculum. Is such knowledge independent of

language-in-use, revealed in occasions of making coherent denotational text, or even

independent of language-as-structured-code, the grammatical system as such?

We have already seen from analysis of transcripts how an emerging cumulative

denotational text, one kind – and generally a one-of-a-kind – of informational structure, unfolds

in social context so as to come to “count-as” what is happening as a kind of social event, the

structure of which we termed an interactional text. Observe how much of the way this happens

at the plane of indexical meaning also comes to define the social roles, identities, and attitudes

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that flow through such a social event – the moves in the indexical pantomime creating an

understood social context around them.

As I noted at the end of last session, we are now trying to understand how language-as-

structured-code and language-in-use play a role in cultural knowledge, structures of cultural

concepts or categorial structures invoked and entailed in-and-by the coordinate processes of

entextualization/contextualization. A good place to start is to understand some of the lessons for

philosophy of language and of mind of what we term anthropological linguistics – the generally

fieldwork-based study of grammatical diversity, especially outside of the humdrum

standardized languages of the nation-state order – in order to see how linguistic anthropology can

make use of these lessons to illuminate the culture-in-language/language of culture issue. As I

said, [Slide 2] we will contrast what we might term grammatico-semantic and grammatico-

pragmatic categories implied in language structure and their connection to conceptual schemata

in organized denotational domains with cultural categories that seem to emerge additionally in-

and-by people’s engaging in discursive interaction in the ways they do, creating in the place and

moment of communication perhaps new conceptual schemata that no one has ever heard of

before. [Slide 3] Such categories are what philosophers term intensional ones – with an -s- – as I

hope you will come to see, invoked in-and-by using an instance or token of them on some

particular occasion, in contrast to extensions, the enumeration of the specific things or states-of-

affairs corresponding to each such token. (And both of these should be contrasted with ostension

of things or states-of-affairs, their presentation to the senses of an Addressee or Receiver.)

***

So let’s locate grammatical structure in a longer tradition of thinking about language as a

denotational instrumentality or mechanism useful for conceptualization and communication.

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We can – reflexively – locate all current language-focused sciences within the European

cultural tradition, itself powerfully refocused by the Enlightenment on the instrumentality of

language as a communicable, and hence sharable, representation of experienced and cognized

universes. (See Aarsleff 1982; Eco 1994; Stillman 1995; Bauman & Briggs 2003; Losonsky

2006.) Within this tradition, and even before and beyond it, three powerful intuitions inform

people’s orientations to language signs, both their own and others’.

One is the intuition that “words” as abstract or at least aggregate entities stand for or even

descriptively substitute for “things” as instances of such “words” recur on particular occasions of

use. Intuitively, people think of themselves as users of particular word- and expression-forms

differentially to single things out by appropriately describing them; in-and-by this act the users

classify things as entities of certain experienceable and/or imaginable classes or categories: my

language describes my universe. That, for example, on some occasion I called something I was

simultaneously pointing at “(this) table” rather than “(that) shelf” must, to such intuition, have

invoked and made relevant to communication a distinction of at least two classes or categories of

phenomena, tables and shelves – that is to say (as so-called form-based relativism asserts) in

such a language community where the two terms, table and shelf, are directly contrasted (on

which more below).

A second intuition is that we can use another, more encompassing particular type of

expression-form, the (actually or recoverably complete) sentence, to describe happenings,

situations or states-of-affairs as actual, or “true,” or non-actual, or “false,” in some experienced

or projectively imaginable sphere or universe. To such an intuition, each turn at talk (in

whatever actual medium: speech, writing, manual signing, etc.) when evaluated as – parsed as –

a sentence, however simple or complex, seems to make a claim about the world as cognized;

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each multi-sentence turn at talk should therefore make coherent – or at least non-incoherent –

claims as to the truth or falsity of states-of-affairs as so described, to whatever level of delicacy

suggested by grammatico-semantic form.

The first of these intuitions, refined, revised, and parceled out ultimately to many

different disciplinary studies in linguistics, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, to name only

some, involves the notion that the descriptive forms of language are in essence labels giving

evidence of a vast classification of seemingly non-linguistic experience and imagination, an

affordance to the users of a language as they communicate about particular individual things

singled out as exemplars by use of sometimes highly constructionally complex expressions

developed out of such classificatory categories. (Such a vast classification is, to be sure, what

we term -onomic knowledge – some people say “encyclopedic knowledge,” others “ontologies”

– to the extent it is the “cosmic system of beliefs” that renders use of language consequential as

social acts of description. Recall how Ms C externalized her –onomic knowledge of the

professional school curriculum which framed her in a complexly -onomizing discourse involving

taxonomies, meronomies, seriations, etc. for poor Mr A, who professed to have no knowledge of

SSA.) Given that language forms are recurrently manifested in spatiotemporally discrete events

of communication, the obvious problems here involve such matters as the stability of the

categorizing effect – particular word- and expression-forms reliably and determinately cueing

particular classes of entitites – across discrete events and even discrete phases of single

communicative events, across types of users even of “the same” language, as well, of course, as

across what are understood to be distinct languages. Centuries of theorizing and empirical

research in several disciplinary lines have tried to clarify these matters, centering on the concept

of LINGUISTICALLY CONSUMMATED REFERENCE, our human cognitive ability to ‘extend’ entities

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via ‘referring expressions’ and what this may reveal about any ‘intensional’ categories by which

we seem, perhaps even systematically, to engage such universes of extendables as categorizable

objects of discourse. (See Quine 1960; Linsky 1971[1967]; Searle 1969:72-96,157-74; Lyons

1977:174-229.)

Refining the second of these intuitions vis-à-vis natural human languages got its impetus

from the nineteenth century’s multi-faceted concern with modeling syllogistic and patterns of

logical inference as an idealized “symbolic logic” to formalize functional human rationality, the

“laws of thought” (G. Boole) as it were, and from the twentieth century’s philosophical turn to

evaluating natural human language and particularly its scientifically usable registers against such

models, a constructive linguistic philosophy of the so called “analytic” type. (See Carnap 1937;

Morris 1938; Searle 1969:97-127; Strawson 1971; Rosenberg & Travis 1971:219-82.) Of

course, since sentence-sized chunks of natural human language are, to this intuition, manifest in

communicative events, the task entailed is to determine how “logical,” that is, transparent to and

consistent with a formalizable calculus of propositional inference, are our sentence-chunked

turns at talk and longer stretches of discourse. One part of a sentence-as-communicated is, by

the first intuition, to be taken as a referring expression, indicating the focal individuable(s) at that

moment in communication. Then the rest of a sentence-as-communicated is intuitively

associable with MODALLY PREDICATING certain states-of-affairs as ‘true/false-of’ the referent(s),

the modality indicating how to calibrate the sphere in which something can be ‘true’ or ‘false’

relative to the sphere in which the users experience the framing communicative event. The

default modality is presumed to be statemental or declarative, used in acts of asserting the

factuality of states-of-affairs in the episteme of the communicative act.

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[In this connection, it should be noted that one of the central contemporary senses of the

term ‘pragmatics’ derives from such an approach, in which, insofar natural human discourse is to

be propositionally interpreted and evaluated, its quirks necessitate a corrective overlay to what

would be a more conformably “logical” interpretability of its linguistic form. Hence, to a

‘logical semantics’ of sentence-expressions, it has been found that we must append a ‘[logical]

pragmatics’ to account for inferential consequences of communication – propositional meanings

apparently conveyed – that seem askew relative to the specific sentence-expression form used

under particular circumstances. (See Grice 1989; and Horn & Ward 2004 for a revealing

survey.)]

It will be noted that if the study of linguistic form as such corresponds to and develops

medieval “grammar,” and if the study of the classificatory, truth-functional, and syllogistic-

inferential counterparts of using language develops and corresponds to medieval “logic,” then

what is missing is the third subject of the medieval trivium, “rhetoric.” Indeed, the effect of (and

in many respects, the impetus for) much of the Enlightenment project for understanding the

nature of language was to reform and refine it in form as an autonomous instrumentality of

(logical) human thought and to direct the resulting semiotic machinery as so understood to

particular representational and thereby ultimately sociopolitical ends, rationalizing (and

“disenchanting”) natural human language for the evolving modern institutional forms congruent

with such views of it and promoting such views of it by its users as a basis of modern

institutional authority. Hence, the ultimately evolved tripartite model of mid-20th century

theorizing (see Morris 1946) about natural human languages sees its semiotics in this light: an

autonomous ‘syntax’ [= grammar] interpretable in terms of – that is, projectable into – a

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referential-and-modally-predicational ‘semantics’ that sometimes requires adjustment relative to

“context” (see below) by a ‘[logical] pragmatics’ of usage.]

Here, then, we approach the third Enlightenment-derived intuition about language: that

the practical role of language in human affairs – what we might term, with J. L. Austin (1962),

“what we do with words,” though of course we can now more adequately term it co-creating

interactional text-in-context – depends on, yet is a separate and distinct function of “what we say

in words,” that is, the referentially and predicationally interpretable forms of language in

communicative context, how “what we say” counts-as “what we do.” The semiotic ideology of

the Enlightenment project focused a suspicious, indeed somewhat negative intuitive regard on

how language essentially mediates the majority of interpersonal human phenomena, in the

Western tradition those mediations having long since been subsumed under the rubric of rhetoric.

Such “rhetorical” phenomena, universal in human social groups, are, to be sure, the

subject matter of the second and wider sense of the ‘pragmatics’ of language that sociolinguistics

and linguistic anthropology develop, beyond the logical one: discourse understood as social

practice or praxis inextricably intertwined and intercalated, it turns out, with anything we might

wish to identify as the manifestation of linguistic form on the axis of grammar-and-logic. So

what I shall term, the DENOTATIONAL VIEW of natural language (adopting Lyons’s [1977:206-15]

cover term) of the modernizing Enlightenment project construes as distinct and separable the

very socio-cultural phenomena of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, but as I presume

you have already seen remains incomplete and unconvincing precisely by excluding them.

Denotation is, in fact, incoherent except when socio-culturally framed and institutionally

licensed, notwithstanding the fact that engaging such wider pragmatic phenomena reveals the

narrowest Enlightenment project for what it is. As will be seen, immanent in and essential to

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language as the central sociocultural semiotic is its peculiar character as a dialectical socio-

semiotic phenomenon in which denotation, to be sure, plays several roles. Language manifests a

tension between [1] what is encompassed in a denotational model so central to the intuitions of

both laypersons and professional students of language in the West, and [2] discourse as practice

(or ‘praxis’) in a sociologically or socio-culturally informed perspective. These two

functionalities engage reciprocally via [3] several planes of metapragmatic reflexivity, about

which more in subsequent classes.

Folk intuitions, as noted, underlie and animate the Enlightenment project for natural

language, conceptualized as a denotational semiotic technology that can be refined and stabilized

independent of the phenomena of “rhetoric.” But perhaps the most important corollary –

whether it was actually dependent on that project or not, it is difficult to tell in our state of

historical retrospection – is the ‘foundationalist’ DOCTRINE OF “LITERAL” DENOTATION that

posits an autonomous denotational mechanism to anchor referring and modally predicating. To

explain this doctrine, see [Slide 4], which from the point of view of an adequate semiotics of

communication sets out what I term the basic “Lockean rectangle” of elements of denotational

literalism.

In the rectangle’s horizontal dimension, the left side of the rectangular array pictures

LINGUISTIC SIGNS; the right side PHENOMENA OF EXPERIENCE AND IMAGINATION differentially

represented during communication in-and-by the use of language (including here focused

thought of an inferential kind). Of course, some of these phenomena of experience and

imagination may themselves be essentially linguistic, as for example when language – forms on

the left side – is used (as in this entire course) as its own DENOTATIONAL METALANGUAGE to

describe linguistic phenomena – now playing the role of entities and states-of-affairs on the right

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side. In the rectangle’s vertical dimension, the upper side of the rectangular array pictures

whatever stability or normativity across events of language usage may be inherent in language

and/or in the phenomena of the universes of experience and imagination, the realm of LINGUISTIC

EXPRESSION-FORM-TYPES and CATEGORIES OF POTENTIAL REFERENTS AND PREDICABLES; the

lower side pictures the event-bound instances of denotational communication in which linguistic

SIGN-TOKENS are used to pick out REFERENTS and modally to predicate-as-‘true’/‘false’ STATES-

OF-AFFAIRS in modally calibratable worlds involving such referents (and possibly other

denotata).

The relationships from upper to lower side and those between left and right sides need

some elaboration. The vertex at the lower left represents occurring instances of language signs,

word- and expression-forms precipitated by signaling and perceiving behaviors in the context of

events of language use. Any empirical study of language begins with corpora of such instances

or tokens, whether finite and “found,” as was the case during an older philological period of

collecting text inscriptions; or developed by systematic, annotated sampling of ongoing usage

(and absence of usage), as in contemporary computer-assisted creation of dynamic corpora; or by

systematically stimulating occurrences achieved by infinitely iteratable elicitation in interviews

with speakers (so-called “fieldwork”) or in laboratory experimentation with them. The point is

that one can collect tokens of form as data-points for many different kinds of investigation of

denotation. Now, from such material it is possible to move to the upper left vertex, the type-

level or covering-law concept of linguistic form, only by assuming that there is something

recurrent or constant about all of the tokens or instances of linguistic form qua form (Bloomfield

1970[1926]:130, def.6); what is constant is, moreover, presumed to be replicated in each

instantiation of an indefinitely large set of such documentable in all the phenomena represented

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in the lower left vertex of the diagram. Linguistic phenomena conceptualized as of the upper left

vertex are, in essence, abstract objects like any covering law – Peirce (1931-58:2.142-3, §246)

termed them Legisigns for this reason – in contradistinction to the phenomena of the lower left,

which are Replicas of each other insofar each is an instance, token, or ‘Sinsign’, as Peirce noted,

of the Legisign. Such Sinsigns INSTANTIATE Legisigns, as Legisigns thus occur IMMANENT IN

each of their Sinsigns; by virtue of this relationship, Legisigns such as abstract linguistic form-

types, can be said to recur in each event of usage instantiating them.

The left edge of our diagram is connected to the right one by relationships of

SIGNIFICATION, the lower right vertex and the upper right one each corresponding to their

respective left-edge vertices in the following sense. When a linguistic token is successfully used

as a denotational sign, the effect is either to differentiate a referent or referents, under whatever

discursive conditions this takes place, or differentially to predicate some state-of-affairs in some

universe calibrated to the universe experienceable in the event of communication. Referent(s)

and states-of-affairs thus constitute the phenomena signaled in-and-by deployment of some token

signal on some occasion of communication in which it occurs. Correspondingly, under the

presumption of denotation, the sign relationship of the upper edge of our rectangle depicts the

situation where the abstract linguistic form-type, the Peircean Legisign, stands for some principle

of grouping entities, something like a class characteristic by which potential referents and states-

of-affairs can be sorted as members of coherently differentiable sets. The intuition is that

Legisigns correspond to classificatory principles, however simple or complex, by which potential

referents and predicable states-of-affairs can be – and in fact, in-and-as we communicate, are –

differentiated by language, “concepts,” as it were, wherever these can be figuratively said to

“live.”

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This (as Peirce termed it [1931-58:143-4, §249) Symbolic relationship of the upper edge

of the rectangle is never straightforwardly experienced as immanent in any individual event of

communication – the phenomena of the lower edge of the figure – except under one specific

assumption – as I have termed it, a corollary intuition: the doctrine of so-called “literal” or

non-“metaphorical” extensions for type-level words and expressions of language, indicated by

the diagonal that runs from upper left vertex to lower right. This intuition is that for every

Legisign expression we can distinguish those referents or states-of-affairs that properly

(normatively) or “literally” (“correctly”) can be signaled by token Sinsigns of the Legisign, from

all other referents or states-of-affairs that, on some occasion of use or other, have been or might

be extended by use of a Sinsign of that expression. So, on some occasion of use of the

expression (this) table while pointing at the referent in question, I may have in fact successfully

extended what should have properly or “literally” been referred to with the expression (this) shelf

– not having seen, for example, that the horizontal wooden surface was not resting on the floor

with legs, so much as it was affixed to a wall by mounting brackets not visible to me. And yet:

(a) I did successfully refer to the entity in perceptual focus, differentiating it for my interlocutor,

and (b) there is, after all, something table-like about the referent, so that, not intending to pun,

one can see that I “extended the meaning” of the Legisign table in the act of extending a shelf

using a token of the term. My event of referring had a certain non-“literal” or a creeping

“metaphorical” character under the doctrine of literal denotation.

But it can be seen, the doctrine of literal denotation actually solves the problem of the

relationship between the upper and lower edges of the Lockean rectangle. It suggests, first, that

instead of focusing on token word- and expression-forms in actual events of communication, we

can unproblematically focus on type word- and expression-forms, that is, that we can

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contemplate and analyze Legisign forms themselves, however the abstraction from and

generalization over tokens is to be achieved. Secondly, the doctrine of literal denotation seems

to suggest that we can collect (at least a sufficiently large sample of) the “literal” referents and

predicable states-of-affairs that correspond to type word- and expression-forms and study them

(independent of their being denotata of language) for some common property or properties that

distinguish them, qua “literally” denotable set of entities or states-of-affairs, from all those other,

non-“literal” ones that may – like our hypothetical example of tables and shelves – creep into

everyday usage, whether by happenstance, by mistake, or by intentional “metaphorical” design.

Were we able to stipulate what is common to the “literal” denotata of a word- or expression-type,

that is, were we able to formulate a covering law predicable-as-‘true’ for all and only the word-

or expression-type’s denotata, generally termed the DESIGNATUM (designation) or (LITERAL)

SENSE of the word or expression, we would be able to stipulate what kind of entities or states-of-

affairs are rightly included among the “literal” denotata; we could identify the designatum –

really a criterion for membership in a logical class – with the vertex at the upper right of the

Lockean rectangle. Then, for “literal” denotational use of language, every referent or state-of-

affairs at the lower right vertex instantiates the designatum of the Legisign to which, on the

upper edge, it corresponds.

We have, in this view, “solved” the Lockean rectangle. But let us consider what it has

taken so to do, starting from upper-left and lower-right vertices in the attempt to stabilize the two

others. First, it must be unproblematic how word- and expression-tokens at the lower left vertex

instantiate word- and expression-types at the upper left vertex. This problem for discourse in

general is rendered somewhat tractable only by assuming that the referring-and-modally-

predicating Sentence-type is the natural and inevitable unit of using language – to be sure, the

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intuitive assumption underlying modern linguistics and related views of language and enshrined

even in the punctuational graphics of modern typography and related secondary linguistic

practices. This assumption amounts to the immanence of systematically analyzable Sentence-

grammar in every occurring chunk of discourse, now parsed into what we term, with Lyons

(1995:259-62), TEXT SENTENCEs (as opposed to the SYSTEM SENTENCEs that stipulate their

recurrent parsability), even if discursive “turns-at-talk” may consist of only fragments of a text-

sentence or, in lengthy monologue, of multiple text-sentences. (We will return to the

problematic entailments of the assumption below.) Second, we have assumed that for any given

word- or expression-type in a particular language, those who “know” the language have strong

and clear intuitions of what “literally” can serve as denotatum of an instance of its use, and

therefore of what cannot so serve. Certainly at the word level, this has proved to be a state of

affairs very problematic to demonstrate empirically, and all evidence suggests rather that even

people thinking themselves to speak the “same” language have widely divergent understandings

of the “literal” meaning of particular word- and expression-types under the intuitive assumptions

described. (See Putnam 1975; Labov 2004[1973].) Third, our solution of the Lockean rectangle

has depended upon having a language-independent way of discovering if (or, that) the “literal”

denotata of a word- or expression-type, collectible, say, through a sufficiently large sampling of

use, can, in fact, be shown to share some property or properties – other than being denotata of a

particular form at issue – that can be described as the criterion for membership in the set of

entities/states-of-affairs that can serve as its “literal” denotatum. It is sometimes assumed that

the phenomena even of the perceivable universe come in – literally! – “natural” classes or

categories, with which, then, “literal” denotation must be in harmony as a “natural” function of

the classifications imminent in the non-semiotic world (Kripke 1970; Rosch 1978; Kay &

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McDaniel 1978). Then why are all systems of intuitively “literal” denotation of that world not

the same? And is there any non-circular way to determine what those “natural” classes are, with

their dimensions of contrast determining inclusion and exclusion of potential “literal” denotata,

without any appeal or essential role for linguistic communication? Only a completely language-

independent determination of such classes or categories would be a valid grounding of the right

edge of the Lockean rectangle so as to anchor the intuition of denotational literalness in an

autonomous explanatory phenomenon.

[Slide 5] Now, as it turns out, much of cognitive psychology, methodologically taking its

cue from positivist philosophy of sense data, has tried just such a method of solution of the right

edge of the Lockean rectangle to triangulate the doctrine of literal denotation. Using laboratory

techniques that are, ultimately, no more sophisticated than the assumption of literalness,

researchers have attempted to demonstrate that an autonomous “natural” world organized by

perceptual dimensions underlies conceptual categorization, and that it is this world that is

reflected at least in systems of word- and expression-types considered as terminological

differentiae. Given the variation in terminological systems for any domain available for

(intuitively “literal”) denotation, such an approach is either based on a particular terminological

system, whether knowingly or unknowingly, or it depends on calibrating and thus mutually

anchoring all known (or possible) terminological systems in respect of their “literal” – strictly

non-“metaphorical” – denotational relationships, were these universally applicable and

determinate phenomena in every language community. As we can see, the approach winds up,

without further refinement, being completely circular. (See John Lucy’s [1997] remarks on

“universals of color [=hue-saturation-brightness] lexicalization, which we will turn to when we

contemplate the denotational domain of ‘color’ or ‘hue’ next time.)

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[Slide 6] Modern linguistic structuralism or formalism, by contrast, has taken an

orthogonal approach to implementing the doctrine of literal denotation, concentrating almost

entirely on anchoring the signifying relationship of the phenomena of the upper side of the

rectangle. That is, linguists start at the upper left vertex with the assumption of a syntax or

GRAMMAR of system-sentence scope, a complex and recursive combinatoric calculus that

determines an internally systematic and autonomous organization of Legisign form in which

classes or categories of ultimate Legisigns under the calculus, lexical and other morphemic

simplexes, combine or concatenate in larger and larger Legisign structures, up to the phrasal

boundaries of the system-sentence. Classes or categories of Legisign form are defined

“distributionally,” that is, as a function of their relational roles in the combinatorics. The

presumption is that insofar lexical simplexes in the upper left vertex of our diagram correspond

to (or bear) senses in the upper right vertex, the sense of any phrase made up of such simplexes

should be a computable function of the senses of the simplexes plus the rules for their

combination into the particular concatenational structure in which they occur one with another.

This is the grammarian’s assumption of the “COMPOSITIONALITY” OF SENSE.

Note also that insofar the very same Legisign form – here exemplified by a phrasal

projection of a common noun – may be instantiated in either referring or predicating segments of

corresponding text-sentences (Round smooth rocks were lying everywhere. vs. I saw a number

of round smooth rocks.), the senses of Legisigns are assumed to be, for purposes of linguistic

analysis, stable as such across their instantiation in event-partials of reference or of predication.

In other words, while at the lower edge of our figure, we are concerned with events of actual

reference and modalized predication, at the top edge we are concerned with a completely

autonomous relationship of signification where the quasi-propositional senses of units up to and

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including system-sentences determine “literalness” of actual events of referring and modally

predicating, but the latter are only in this special way instantiations of sense-bearing Legisigns.

(This is the import of the Chomskian discernment of “logical form” corresponding to syntactic

structure, as opposed to propositional reference-and-modalized-predication. See Jackendoff

1990.) In fact, we might say that insofar senses in the upper plane of system-sentencehood

constitute a propositionally relevant semantic universe, they are indeed essentially incomplete,

requiring a logical pragmatics of deixis to describe what text-sentences actually do as the frames

in which referring and modally predicating expressions actually occur as language users engage

in referring and predicating under particular contextual conditions.

The Ascended Genevan Master, Saussure, set the parameters of all modern formalism, in

which the mutual distributional properties of grammatical forms, insofar determinate, project

into intensional categorial distinctions. Grammar becomes in this way a vast meta-semantic, but

one that is implicit – immanent is Kant’s word – in the very formedness of messages in events of

communication. Contrast this implicit meta-semantic characteristic of grammatical form with

acts of communicating meta-semantically, a discursively explicit meta-semantic. [Slides 7,8]. In

terms of our desire to put the intuitive meta-pragmatic doctrine of “literal denotation” on a firm

scientific footing – see [Slide 9] – we see that formal or structural-functional linguistics breaks

the problem down into two steps or analytic operations, as shown in [Slide 10].

[Excursus on Saussure’s Course of General Linguistics:

words-for-things denotational “nomenclaturism” vs. [‘lexemes’]-for-‘concepts’

The Lockean rectangle would have nomenclaturism – how words and expressions stand for

things and situations in the actual world on occasions of referring and predicating – at the token

edge of things, but how could one ever speak of norms this way? It is the symbolic relation of

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something in language form that stands-for some principle that groups referents and predicable

states-of-affairs. Lexemes are abstractions from the text-sentential forms – words, collocations,

expressions – to what is purportedly common to all such actual discursive material as immanent

language forms: hence, book-, be- good-, [be- … -ing [V-]], etc.

[indexical, iconic] motivation vs. “arbitrariness” of signification as a fundamental

postulate;

For 2,000 or so years in the Western tradition, people thought about nomenclature, worrying if

indexicality and iconicity as phenomena – think of illocutionary forms or onomatopoeias –

meant that language is “natural” or “motivated” by externalities in the way non-degenerate

iconicity and indexicality work. Theories of semiotic evolution of the “Bow-Wow,” “Ding-

Dong,” and “Yo-Heave-Ho” schools. Once we leave the realm of nomenclaturism, we can

postulate, says Saussure, the marginality of iconicity and indexicality to the underlying system of

denotation: the linguistic sign – the linkage between form-type and concept – is fundamentally

“arbitrary” in this respect until shown to be otherwise.

absolute (motivation) vs. [system-] relative (motivation);

But there is a kind of “motivation” of the form—meaning relationship that emerges, as we will

see, by the hypothesis of how grammar is a systematic semiotic, not a random one. If every sign

form, no matter how simplex or complex, were completely arbitrary in relation to how it

communicated conceptual content, then language becomes a vast dictionary, and we would have

to memorize every possible connection between every possible linguistic form and the concept

that corresponded to it. But language tends to work on a principle of compositionality, such that

if we have a relatively complex sign-form, its conceptual correspondent is a computable function

of the relatively more simplex sign-forms of which it is composed, plus the way in which they go

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together to make up the more complex form. In this way, relatively complex sign-forms have

“motivated” meanings, but meanings motivated by the systematicity of grammar. Lexicon, as

Bloomfield noted, is the ultimately “arbitrary” residue when no further grammar can be squeezed

out of the particular form.

signification vs. value (valence);

Signification in the Lockean rectangle runs horizontally; Saussure diagrams with his football or

lozenge shape the signifier or sign-form-type in relation to the signified, the concept associated

with it. His point is that the possibility of associating any concept with a signifier is actually a

function of the way that signifier bears a whole set of complex relations to every other signifier

in a grammatical system. The value of the signifier determines the very possibility of the

signifier entering into a relationship of signification with the signified. Syntagmatic relations of

axiomatically linear co-occurrence and paradigmatic (associative) relations of substitutability at

any level of structure. Hierarchical structure – “constituency” – emerges from iteration after

iteration of such syntagmatic putting together (concatenation).

Degrees of freedom of combinatorics. Traffic lights with zero degrees of internal combinatoric

freedom, wine with five (according to connoisseurs). Language has one degree of apparent

combinatoric freedom in Saussure’s hypothesis. Paradigms derive from syntagmatic structures;

not vice versa.

lexical [signification] vs. grammatical;

Insofar the underlying lexemes are signifiers, they have what we term ‘senses’. But as we

analyze them we discover that they are compositional and depend on many forms of

arrangement, each one of which contributes something to the conceptual meaning of the whole.

real-time and real ‘parole’ vs. systemic and virtual ‘langue’;

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We feel ourselves – bottom of Lockean rectangle – to be doing “language-ing” in realtime

events; but note that the underlying system – langue or code – is only virtual; we indexically

presume upon it as ‘cosmic knowledge’ whenever we speak, like any Legisign system.

syntagmatic relations experienceable “in præsentia” vs. paradigmatic (“associative”)

relations experienceable only “in potentia.”

Values inhere in the Legisigns of such a system, and we can get at value – and thus signification

– only by showing the place of every sign-form in the system in relation to every other. Since

this involves massive conceptual analysis, it is obvious that the system is never experienceable as

such in any entextualization; only reflexes of the normative code manifest, but are most directly

experienceable in syntagmatic unfolding of tokens of the type-forms underlying. (Text-

sentences vs. system-sentences.)]

Saussure’s proposal to remove the study of (Peircean) symbols from “nomenclaturism,”

the fruitless arguments about how word- and expression-types “literally” denote “things,” was to

recognize that the only way to study signification, the relation of ‘signifiers’ to their ‘signifieds’

– a relation that is so intuitively transparent to native speakers of any language that it is an

extraordinary feat to teach elementary linguistics! – is to view signifiers in terms of ‘valence’

categories: by the combinatoric properties of kinds of signifiers, so-called categories of ‘form’ or

‘formal categories’, and how complex signifiers are composed of more elementary ones. There

is what we term a “syntax” of the system of signifiers, rules of how relatively more simplex

signifier-units are concatenated into relatively more complex ones. This is what we term

‘grammar’; it is not an easy matter to figure out the grammar of any language, let alone what

may be common to all languages in this respect (“universal” is the linguist’s preferred term).

The categories of the value system are determined on the basis of hypotheses about how a given

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structure of differences would project into context-free denotational differences; that is, to look

at the corresponding lower row in our Lockean rectangle, how use of any token of a form-type in

an event of communication would differentially denote some class or category of things, in

contrast to use of a token of one of the other form-types in the relevant value-structure – purely

as a function of the signifier structure (else it would be in the realm of indexicality/pragmatics).

Differential signaling – ‘signified’ (and hence denotation)-determining – capacity dependent

only on the form of the signifier, is at issue. [By the way, if the answer is, there are no such

kinds of sign phenomena even in language, then language is not, as it turns out, a Saussurean

symbol system, and we can turn our attention elsewhere. In fact, the Saussurean assumptions

have allowed us as linguists to clarify vast stretches of the structure of languages around the

world.]

The structuralist impulse of the Ascended Genevan Master is that the “valences” of combinatoric

structures – cf. Mendeleev’s periodic table of the elements [Slide 11] are the determining

characteristic of the Legisign system termed langue, what we see as the system for generating an

infinite number of internally complex signifiers – language forms – from relatively more simplex

ones plus determinate rules of concatenation in one dimension. [Slides 12, 13, 14] Iterating such

concatenations yields a hierarchical internal complexity to most signifiers, such as [[The [quick

[brown [fox]]]] [jumped [over [the [sleeping [dog]]]]].], made up of

[The [quick [brown [fox]]]] and [-ed [[jump- [over [the [sleeping [dog]]]]]] in the first instance,

but each of these a tiered or iterated concatenation of parts: [the [quick brown fox]], the latter

[quick [brown fox]], the latter [brown [fox]]; and [jumped [over [the sleeping [dog]]], which is,

serially revealed to be [ed- [jump- over the sleeping dog]], the latter [jump- [over the sleeping

dog]], the latter [over [the sleeping dog]], the latter akin to [The quick brown fox] in internal

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structure. Observe how each of both the ultimate simplex signifiers here and as well each of the

intermediate levels of complex signifiers can enter into a paradigmatic contrast with others,

yielding, in the instance, a different but partially same, structurally (syntagmatically) related and

comparable signifier. This is what it means to do a grammatical analysis of complex signifiers to

reveal what relatively more simplex ones are concatenated so as to comprise it.

When we have a grammatical analysis of this sort, note that as we substitute a signifier/form for

another according to the paradigmatic class in which they belong, the signified/meaning of the

whole complex signifier changes accordingly. Whatever fox- means, if we substitute rabbit-,

then the meaning of each of the signifiers/forms that hierarchically encloses – linguists say

“dominates,” an unfortunate term! – the respective form changes accordingly. Thus, we can say

that there is a certain constancy of meaning we can assign to each form, its ‘sense’ under

distributional analysis. (Recall here our discussion of denotational function-sub-one under the

Searlean analysis: that ‘predication’ is the communication of the ‘sense’ or characterizability

condition associated with an expression as subject to evaluation as a “true” or “false” description

of a state-of-affairs in the world – or some world, while ‘referring’ is the communication of that

very same sense or characterizability condition as indexically presumed truthfully to apply-to

some entity presumed to exist at that moment. Between the two, note, the ‘sense’ or

interpretability of any word or expression as a characterizability condition of such-and-such sort

remains the same. Here is the structuralist theory of where such characterizability conditions

come from – from an internal distributional structure of legisign forms/signifiers.)

The important thing to see is that in terms of ‘privileges of occurrence’ in relation to any of the

other signifiers in a phrase or sentence, all forms are not, in fact, equivalent: some occur in some

distributions and some occur in others. For the signifier desk- that might occur in [The quick

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brown fox jumped over the desk.], note that it cannot occur where jump- does. *[The quick

brown fox desked over the sleeping dog.], say. Languages consist of asymmetrically distributed

kinds of complex signifiers that themselves are built around asymmetrically distributed simplex

signifiers, the ultimate bits of lexical material obvious when we approach those realizable as

chunks of text. That’s where we get the concept of ‘parts of speech’ in traditional school

grammar, from such facts as that there seem to be simplexes unique to referring expressions in

actual text-exemplification, and simplexes unique to predicating expressions when realized in

text-sentence chunks.

The union of all the distributional privileges of occurrence of a class or category of

signifiers, modern formal analysis understands, may include or make use of the configuration of

hierarchical structure as well as the linear structure; this is particularly the case for many

configurative distributions of syntagmatic co-occurrence, [Slide 14] such as the ‘agreement’ of

the constituents serving as subjects of predicating verbs in a language like English: [My quick

brown fox from the Windsors is/*are destined for the hunt today.] – note the distinction between

mere closeness of pieces of the sentence vs. the fact that fox- is hierarchically the centerpiece

(linguists say the ‘phrasal head’) of the whole complex signifier [my quick brown fox from the

Windsors]. Taking all this into consideration, every unique distributional class under a

language’s rules of concatenation – its syntax and morphology – is associated with a

grammatical name or label that points to [1] its particular unique distributional properties, its

unique ‘valence’-class; and, by the Saussurean assumption, [2] to some corresponding effect in

conceptual sense, even if only indirectly. If simplex signifiers can be grouped into paradigmatic

classes on the basis of their parallelism of distribution under a grammar, then they ought to have

some conceptual projection, some Saussurean ‘sense’ or signified, in common. So note, insofar

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even simplex signifiers – roots and stems of simple words – are Saussurean signifiers, their

“meaning” or corresponding signifieds are purely a correspondence of their distributions. The

Saussurean sense of every class of signifiers, down to the unique simplex lexical form – the class

of one – is grammatically determined under the structuralist hypothesis; there is no distinction

between so-called “lexical” and so-called “grammatical” meaning – though to any speaker of a

language it is clear that words and expressions – those objects of reflexive contemplation that

live in entextualizations-in-context – have denotational values associable with them on perhaps

other grounds (as we will see later in our course). Structuralism rejects this intuition, basing all

“meaning” of Symbols in the grammar and its distributional (valence) categories correlated with

differential denotational effects. Another way of saying this is that the grammar is an implicit

metasemantics for a language; by virtue of the patterns of distribution, positive and negative, we

can deduce the differential senses we can assign to signifiers, even if we experience them as

words and expressions. (And note the attempts of dictionaries and other such paraphernalia to

make explicit the sense relations of various words and expressions, insofar the senses enter into

structures of -onomic kinds, such as tax-onomies, mer-onomies, serial structures, etc., with or

without a special set of metasemantic operators like [ ] be- a kind of [ ] and so forth.) We might

say by contrast grammatical description of signifiers is like an X-ray of the words and

expressions in which form they materialize in entextualization-in-context. One can see that

finding the paradigmatically contrastive distributional classes is the first order of business, and

then correlating the paradigmatic contrast with some contrast of denotation in the more complex

signifiers in which the paradigmatically contrastive forms occur. Only then can we associate a

particular form with a particular meaning, realizing it is always differential form and differential

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meaning with which structuralist analysis deals. (“Dans la langue il n’y a que des differences,

sans termes positifs.” – as the Ascended Master noted.)

Observe also [bottom of Slide 13] that for each significant paradigm of contrastive units, we

have grammarians’ labels that are ultimately ways of suggesting what is key in the semantic

projection of members of that distributional class as distinct from all other comparable classes.

We will return to this problem of labeling after we see the logic of structural analysis in the

realm of phonologico-phonetic structural units.

So how do we solve the right side of the Lockean rectangle? Here the lessons learned in

the study of sound systems illuminate what is at issue.

You will recall that I noted last time, that while for any true Saussurean unit, its

characteristic is to be solely a negative, correlative entity whose “most exact property is to be

what others are not,” the discovery that phonological/phonemic structure lurks within – the X-ray

metaphor – the actual phonetics of articulating and transmitting and aurally processing utterances

emerged by the logic of the grouping of substantive variance into categorial units of equivalence

– equivalence classes that render actual sound segments tokens of some constant phonological

type. This model was then calqued – copied, mutatis mutandis, point for point – for the analysis

of all the other planes of semiotic structure in language. In the 20th century, it was even applied

way beyond language in other semiotic codes of culture, generally with highly problematic

results because such other codes operate in the first instance indexically and iconically, though,

as Roland Barthes astutely observed, saturated with language as an explicit or implicit meta-

semiotic.

So for us the importance of looking at the distinction between event-bound token

phonetic facts and structure- or norm-bound type phonological (“phonemic”) facts is to see

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what is necessary to an empirical science of true Peircean symbols, the project of modern formal

linguistics. [Slides 16, 17]

How do we anchor a phonological analysis in phonetic reality? [Slide 18] Troubetzkoy

and Jakobson, my teacher, proposed that the paradigmatic contrasts of phonemic (phonological)

units – which, recall, will be sets of phonemic categories that are distributed in parallel in

relation to making syllables – operate along phonetically extensionalizable – that is

pronounceable and hearable – but intensional dimensions-of-contrast, which they termed

‘distinctive features’. As the simplest hypothesis, Jakobson further assumed that these

dimensions-of-contrast or features have only two values (signaled by polar distinctions of ‘+’ vs.

‘-‘, though ‘1’ and ‘0’ or any other digital quantization would work), such that every

paradigmatic contrast of a phonemic segment with every other phonemic segment in a language

can be expressed as the logical Boolean combination – meaning, simply, the simultaneous

relevance – of all of the distinctive features that explain their respective distributional privileges

of occurrence in syllabic structures. [Slide 19] Feature-values, + and -, etc., differentiate the

landmark variants, the intensional prototypes, we should call them, that define the continuous

extensional regions of phonetic realization of phonemic categories. If we recorded 10K

exemplars of pronunciation of purportedly “the same” word-form, it is almost certain that some

of the token variants of the pronunciations would overlap those of the pronunciation of a

phonologically related word-form: think of swill and swell having some tokens among the 10K

pronunciations sounding like [swəl]. “What was that you said? ‘This is swill!’ or ‘This is

swell’? Learn to talk more carefully or you’ll offend someone, Bub!” The particular token of

the syllable nucleus phonological type overlapped the categories, but the categories as such are

distinct, and anchored in phonological space at /I/ vs. /ε/, realizable – extensionalizable – as [I]

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vs. [ε]. As we communicate, the theory tells us, it is as though simultaneously the values along

each among the sum total of dimensions of contrast are in play defining each segment we utter

and hear, changing over the durational time of the linear Saussurean signal as it unfolds in what

we process as syllables.

[Slide 20] Every phonemic segment now becomes the sum total of all its values along

these dimensions of contrast, and we can group or cluster phonemes in a structured space so as to

see that whole groups of phonemic units cluster in certain sub-spaces of contrastive phonetic

realization, and that there are many ways of creating such lesser-dimensioned sub-spaces so as to

reveal all the ways each phoneme is like others that have parallelism of distribution. Phonemes

of a similarly-featured feather distributionally flock together. That is, the distributional classes

of phonemic units are not fundamentally or radically “arbitrary” in that any old phonemic type

can occur in any old syllabic position. T & J hypothesized, there is a force of phonemic

homeostasis that operates universally in languages, such that the category-defining landmark

variants of the categories of phonemic systems tend to be organized into symmetric, equidistant

structures of oppositions (paradigmatic contrast) as intensional cognitive spaces that are

comparable across languages. We can compare any given region of extensionalizable phonemic

contrast – phonemic units that have parallel distributions and, by hypothesis, some featural

“content” in common – in two or more languages, to see [1] how many phonemic units contrast

in that particular sub-space of paradigmatic opposition, such as, shown in [Slides 21-24] 2, 3, 4,

… , 6, … distinctive vowels in a system, and to note [2] that the landmark values have an orderly

relationship across languages: the landmarks remain landmarks in each respective system, a

point of stable contrast valid across language systems regardless of whether or not they are

implemented in a particular system: thus [α] is the intensional prototype of the [-high] vowel in a

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2-vowel system and the 3-vowel system; it is the [-high, +back] vowel of a four-vowel system;

etc.

Here is where we come to the Prague School hypotheses about the relationship of distributional

classes of sound segments to a kind of universal substrate of phonetics-as-possible-phonology

that provides the way to decide between the “right” and “wrong” analyses of phonological

structures in any natural language whatsoever. The overall hypothesis is that denotationally

relevant sound as producible and audible for the purpose of making language is, cognitively, not

a continuous multidimensional cloud or measurable space, but one organized by intersecting,

quantized dimensions of contrast – termed ‘features’ – of a plausibly binary [= 2-possible-

values] character,

‘Features’ as descriptors, thus intensional specifications ‘f(x)’ that can be true or false, or

probabilistically true or false, of some object – here, the segment-of-the-moment-of-

phonological-realization in the linear flow of the syllable—word—phrase—sentence—etc.

Every segment enters into many different paradigmatic contrasts as a function of its total

distribution in the language, and thus each segment-type has at least as many feature-

specifications simultaneously as there are paradigms in which it contrasts with at least one other

phonological segment. So consider syllabic structure C-V(-C) [Slide 20] once more in the

potential sequential complexity of each of the major syntagmatic positions, and note that from a

distributional point of view there are really four categories of relatively more “vowel”-like and

relatively more “consonant”-like segment-types: [+cns, -voc] – can also be written in vertical

dimension to emphasize the non-syntagmatic way features combine (logical ‘and’ = “Boolean

combination”) – [-cns, + voc], [+cns, +voc], ?[-cns, -voc] (THERE ARE PROBLEMS WITH

THIS PARTICULAR SET OF FEATURES, SO IT IS MERELY AN ILLUSTRATION

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Phonologists and phoneticians argue about what is the optimal set of features in terms of which

the maximal number of facts can be explained.). How features combine one with another to

define the segment-types of any particular language defines the structure of the phonological

inventory as a cognitive space of landmarks such that

(1) variance such as occurs in the extensional realization of any phonological category defined

by an intensional prototype in feature space projects into continuous regions of the space, -- here,

note how only one of the solutions of the phonological structure of the languages satisfies this

criterion – DISTANCE FUNCTION to measure relative similarity – which means that members

of a particular phonological category, a phonological segment-type, will always be at least as

relatively “close” to the landmark of the class than to that of any other phonological category.

These cluster around

(2) [Slide 25] landmark sound-types [= intensional prototypes for sounds], generally manifesting

in distribution as the maximally non-conditioned (“unmarked”) variant – hence, for a-vowel

language, with /a/--/i/--/u/, which unlike the variants ε,ͻ, e, o are generally unpredictable of

occurrence by syntagmatic context, occurring in all other possible word- and syllabic-positions –

and

(3) these intensional prototypes will define a structure of productive and receptive difference that

is comparable and stable across all languages. The idea is that systems of different ‘delicacy’ of

categorial differentiation are nevertheless organized around cross-linguistically stable intensional

prototypes, no matter how many paradigmatic distinctions there are for that distributional class.

Hence, if a vowel system has three vowels, note [α]—[i]—[u] must be landmarks of three

different phonological vowels. And supposing a language has two vowels, like Kabardian, a

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Kartvelian language of the Caucasus? Then [α] is still in a different category from the other

intensional landmark vowel, [ə] (“schwa”), along a dimension of tongue height/aperture width.

(The mathematics for designing such a space of nested spaces of orthogonal difference need not

concern us at this point; what is critical is that we get a good intuitive picture of what is being

proposed in such a correspondence that sets up: [a] an individual Saussurean phonological

system for some specific language; [b] its projection into experienceable phonetic reality in a

particular way, and [c] its conformation to expectations of “possible” vs. “impossible”

phonological systems in the way that distributional classes (syntagmatically based paradigms of

contrast) can be calibrated across language structures by reference to the intensional prototype

landmarks. For any kind of distributional privileges of occurrence defining a position of possible

paradigmatic contrast, then, we should be able to predict, given n distinct phonemic segment-

types that fill it, which intensional prototype sounds will be in distinct categories, with some

typological variation as to the possibilities.

So segmental phonological categories are defined by intensional prototypes that intersect values

along several dimensions – “features” – simultaneously, plus all of the variance-around-the-

prototype that may even overlap the variance of another phonological category. There is an ideal

system of structured opposition manifest in how the intensional prototypes are actualized

(become extensional through pronunciation and hearing).

So the only way we can determine the feature structure operating in some particular

language is to look at it in the light of general expectations for the distributional class –

differential intensional phonetic prototype correspondence or projectability for all the languages

of the world. Note that this is at once a theoretical position and an empirical enterprise: if we

don’t know that something should be possible in the sound system of a language on the basis of

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prior experience, then we are faced with the problem of either revising our general expectations

or concluding that what looks like a violation of expectation really is not.

Remember that in structural-functional analysis we are not describing the entire phonetics of a

language, what one can measure in the way of clouds of variability among tokens of usage. We

are describing the categories of significant paradigmatic contrast relative to the syntagmatics, the

concatenation-structure, of phonological form. In the actual flow of language, one is claiming, it

is as though n parameters of perceptual landmarks (for some relatively small number n, the

featural dimensions necessary to describe paradigmatic contrast in some language) are

autonomously shifting in value as someone speaks and another processes the signal form: feature

[fi] moves from value [+] to [-] as feature [fj] moves from [-] to [+] and feature [fk] stays constant

at its value, whether [+] or [-]. Our cognitive mechanism for the production and reception of

phonologically formed code is this extraordinary ability to render the continuous signal of

melody and white noise an apparently digital one, reconstructing the Saussurean syntagmatic

order in syllabic representation of point-like segments that are simultaneously paradigmatic units

defined along all the significant dimensions of contrast.

How to bring these lessons of phonology into the comparative analysis of what we term

‘grammatical categories’? [Slide 26] We will want to see that at the planes of grammar and

sense-semantics, there are parallelisms, in that ‘grammatical categories’ are like features,

organizing spaces of conceptual contrast – differential intensional prototypes – that are the

anchors or stable points in terms of which the universes of actual denotata – referents and

predicated states-of-affairs – are construed. Do such intensional prototypes emerge from the

structure of grammars or the structure of the universe or from some interaction between the two?

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(I hope you see Locke’s problem already implied here: ‘senses’ in the upper right vertex of the

Lockean rectangle are precisely such differential intensional prototypes.)

Now, armed with an understanding of phonology as opposed to phonetics, we can return

to our main point, the fact that Saussureanism – really, the analysis of language as a Peircean

symbol system – is a workable solution only under these conditions, where the analysis of any

one system of symbolic units implies a framework of calibration of that system with any other

such system, such as was hypothesized by Troubetzkoy and Jakobson in the realm of

phonologico-phonetic correspondence. It is now called “universal grammar”; Whorf called it a

system of taxonomic universals for grammatical categories. Phonemic or phonological systems

are calibratable one with another precisely as they are structures of paradigmatic contrast of

abstract units that correspond across systems in the way they are extensionalizable as regions of

variance-around-intensional-prototypes . The assumption of a cognitive theory of feature-

spaces defining denotational domains that organize grammatical categories is the key idea.

Can one simply approach the problem of meaning categories directly, as for example is

the somewhat desperate attempts by experimental cognitive psychologists to extract inductively

from a sufficient number of trials of reactive grouping of actual objects as stimuli the apparent

“concept” that lies behind such grouping? (Forget the differential here; they haven’t gotten that

far beyond Locke himself.)

We will want to see that at the analytic plane of grammar and sense-semantics, there are

parallelisms to phonology, in that ‘grammatical categories’ are like phonological features in this

respect, organizing spaces of conceptual contrast – differential intensional prototypes – that are

the anchors or stable points in terms of which the universes of actual denotata – referents and

predicated states-of-affairs – are construed by the way we talk about/represent them. Do such

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intensional prototypes emerge from the structure of grammars or the structure of the universe or

from some interaction between the two?

So the analysis of language as a Peircean symbol system is a workable solution only

under these conditions, where the analysis of any one system of symbolic units implies a

framework of calibration of that system with any other such system, such as was hypothesized by

Troubetzkoy and Jakobson in the realm of phonologico-phonetic correspondence. We need a

concept of grammatico-semantic (and grammatico-pragmatic) dimensions-of-contrast. In short,

a theory of grammatical categories in various areas of extensionalizable denotation that has the

same power as the theory of distinctive features in phonology. This is, of course, precisely what

the classic writings of Boas, Sapir, Bloomfield, and Whorf were attempting to establish. Viable

theories of grammatical categories presume that there are areas of differential denotation, what

we can term denotational domains, that are comparable to the sub-spaces in phonemic space in

that they must be comparable across languages, and that languages will tend to manifest

similarities of structural arrangement in the way that such denotational domains manifest in the

formal structure of linguistic signs.

Boas said, [Slide 27] “Since the total range of personal experience which language serves

to express is infinitely varied, and its whole scope must be expressed by a limited number of

phonetic groups, it is obvious that an extended classification of experience must underlie all

articulate speech” (“Introduction” to Handbook of American Indian Languages). Here are the

questions, then, that these linguists were asking: How can we compare and ‘calibrate’ languages

insofar engines of thought revealed in denotational functionality? Are all languages

“universally” made up of the same grammatical categories? If not, does it make any difference

to the users – to the linguistic community in the first instance, to their various social

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organizational groups and categories in the second – how they “classify experience” via the

formal structures – the syntagmatic and paradigmatic structures – of their languages? If all

languages extend to the same or similar human experience, what effect might result from

seemingly very different formal expression – or lack of formal expression – of some area of

denotation, of some denotational domain?

As you can see, one cannot even ask these questions without a rich theory of a sort very

much along the lines that we have fashioned for phonologico-phonetic matters.

How indeed does this lesson apply to grammar? Thinking back to our Lockean rectangle

[Slide 9], if Saussurean differential signifiers – morphological and grammatical structural forms

– project into differential signifieds – senses immanent in our ability to refer and to predicate –

what is the nature of those signifieds and how can we analyze them? On the analogy to

phonology, we should say, Saussurean ‘senses’ are such intensional prototypes that anchor

different conceptual categories in terms of which we refer and we predicate in actual events of

using language. [Slide 10] Note that denotation, the diagonal line connecting Legisigns with the

phenomena of the universe of experience and actualized conceptualization, is now broken into

two aspects: [1] the ‘sense’ relation, a true symbolic relation in the Peircean mode, which

anchors linguistic forms insofar conforming to combinatoric rules of grammar (that build

relatively more complex ‘sense’-bearing units from relatively more simplex ones) to a

universally relevant differential structure of intensional prototypy (unless grammar is completely

arbitrary as a formal structure); and [2] the instantiation by which such intensional prototypy is

applied so as to characterize some specific referent or situation-to-be-described. The intensional

prototypy is a way of communicating about the world; what relation does it bear to, for example,

“thinking” about the world? Is “translation” possible only to the extent that human cognition is

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anchored by universals of intensional prototypy in various referential and predicational domains

– denotational domains – that structure human languages everywhere with criteria for conformity

sufficient to make translation at the level of Saussurean prototypes possible? I hope you can see

the importance of empirical research within this structural-functional understanding of Peircean

thirdness. It is nothing less than the pursuit of universals of human thought in relation to the

existence of multiple languages.

In America, this essentially Saussurean approach to studying language structure was

developed through what we term the “Boasian tradition” of the study of the “exotic” indigenous

languages of the Americas – “exotic” to European experience, that is. In each instance, the

questions one must ask triangulate via the attempt to analyze the specific language and its “emic”

distributional categories and how they seem to project into distinctions of intensional prototypes

[‘concepts’; ‘senses’; ‘meanings’; etc.] anchoring categories of possible referents and predicable

states-of-affairs with how such an analysis is either predictable from, or requires changes in, the

“etic” expectations we have already built up from all the prior analyses of languages. This is an

empirical science of symbolic form, in which “description” always implies at least implicit

“comparison,” or, as Whorf termed it “calibration” of languages much as he attempted to show

the calibration of English and Hopi around the predicational problem of reporting an event in

relation to its dimensions of availability to Sender and Receiver, as we’ll illustrate in a bit. As

grammatical categorial structures – forms projecting into/from structures of difference of

intensional prototypy along particular conceptual dimensions of contrast – the two languages in

fact differ while achieving the same extensional result in discourse.

Whorf brilliantly articulated their kind of structural-functional typological relativism

centered on the problem of the grammatical category, demonstrating how the categories

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definable in particular language-structures by linguists’ distributional analytic techniques were

the proper locus of cross-language comparison and generalization – what Kenneth Pike, of the

University of Michigan, would later (1954:8-28) term the “emic” structural-functional particulars

against the universalistic “etic” space of possibilities for structured systems of coding categories.

Whorf’s point in the comparison is simply that there is typologically interesting

categorial variability observable in denotational language structures, such that when we look at

new and “exotic” language structures for their coding categorizations, we discover all kinds of

enrichments to our up-to-then accumulated experience of linguistic coding that make us revise

our expectations at the etic level, the space of universally available possibilities for

grammatically-coded conceptual differentiations.