0.
Introductory.* I do not propose to say anything new here so much as to reexamine
briefly some of the fundamental properties that have been recurrently predicated
of ‘natural languages’ and to follow up some of the implications of what this
reexamination reveals. The three properties
we are going to take up, namely, arbitrariness,
necessity, and the duality of patterning (respectively
in §§ 1, 2, 3), are logically distinct from each other.
It is true that they have frequently been confused with each other in the
past, but that is all the more reason for making a special effort to keep them
apart in mind.1
While considering arbitrariness and necessity, we can
very well assume that Saussure’s analysis of the linguistic sing into the significant
and the signifié is an adequate one and not worry too much about the various refinements,
elaborations, reservations, and revisions proposed by later thinkers.
With pattern duality, as we shall see, it is another matter.
Having considered the three properties and their interrelations
(§ 5).
1. Arbitrariness. Cross-linguistically, the relation
between the significant and the signifié is arbitrary. There is no extra-linguistic reason2
why the given significant should not be correlated with other than its usual signifié
in a given language, and vice versa. We
are quite justified in laughing at the English soldier who criticized the French
for calling a cabbage a shoe (Fr. Chou /šu/).
A symbolism is non-arbitrary when there is some sort
of an appropriateness about it-for example, the geometrical similarity between
a map and the original landscape, the similarity of responses that make darkness
a symbol of ignorance, the stimulus-response relationship that makes bright red
more suitable as a symbol of danger than, say, pale blue.
1.1. Marginal exceptions. In such phenomena as onomatopoeia, sound symbolism,
or phonaesthesis, we have to concede that extra-linguistic reasons can be given
and so to that extent the arbitrariness of language symbolism is mitigated.
But even here it is a common-place that these fancied connections between
the sound sequence and the sound or other thing referred to vary considerably
from language to language. Thus the element of arbitrariness enters into
the picture again.
A more convincing case of linguistic iconism is that
of the quotation or citation, when the significant is a specimen of the signifié,
namely, some form-token (Archimedes said, Eureka), form-type (the form
‘took’), or set of form-types (the pronoun “thou” is obsolete – referring
to thee, thy, and thine as well) in a language. Even here, minor stipulations have to be made
for each language – for example, Marathi employs the masculine singular nominative
in citing a variable adjective or adds the so-called ‘inherent’ vowel /ә:/
in naming a consonant.
Tactical features in the significant admit of a subtler
iconism. The overt order of items within
a sentence often strikes us ‘natural’. What is more ‘natural’ and appropriate than that we should speak
of *cash and carry or* children and wife, or what words which go
together in meaning tend to go together in the temporal speech sequence, or that
connectives should come between the items they connect? Indeed when we come to the largest grammatical
unit in size, the sentence, the grammarian gives up and refuses to give
any linguistic account of why the sentences in a text occur in the order in which
they do.3 Similar considerations will be seen to apply to tactical
features other than overt order.
Finally, we could take note of cases of indirect iconism.
In words like cuckoo the significant is iconic of the cry, which
in turn is metonymically associated with the signifié proper, the bird.
When we say, The word “man” is spelled with three letters, the significant
is iconic of the spoken form which in turn calls forth the signifié proper, namely,
the written form. In the obscure area
of intonations, vocal qualifiers, and the like, the limits of the principle of
arbitrariness could perhaps be formulated in some such terms: the significant
is iconic (not acoustically so much as in respect of articulation) of a gesture
which is itself a sign (not necessarily iconic) of the signifié proper, namely,
the attitude of the speaker to the addressee and to the matter-in-hand.
Cases of non-arbitrary linguistic symbols other than
the iconic ones are not easy to think of. One
can think of the choice of an overt order dictated by what is appropriate according
to good manners –ladies and gentlemen! or you and I rather than
*gentlemen and ladies! or* I and you.
For
all such exceptions to arbitrariness, one can say that to the extent that the
extra-linguistic reasons in question are culture-bound in their cogency, they
are a less serious threat to the principle.
2. Necessity. Intra-linguistically, the relation between
the significant and the signifié is a necessary one-a relation of solidarity or
coimplication.4 There is
never a linguistic reason why the given significant should be correlated with
other than its usual signifié in a given language, and vice versa.5
This is the linguistic or notational analogue to the logical axioms of identity
and non-contradiction, A is A and A is not non-A.
A symbolism is non-necessitarian when there is either
one-to-many or many-to-one or many-to-many correspondence between signifiants
and signifiés. Signs may be either ambiguous
or alternating.
2.1. Marginal exceptions. No natural language is fully necessitarian,
though its users have to proceed as if it is (and the same goes for its students).
When the same signifiant is correlated with different
signifies, we have either homonymy (Marathi /palәk/ ‘guardian’, ‘spinach’)
or polysemy (Marathi /toṇḍ/
‘mouth; face’) according as the aberration is more or less serious. These two are, however, never so numerous in
a language as to frustrate the modest optimism of GREENBERG’S observation (1957,
p. 35): “Just because you call a dog a ‘dog’, it does not mean that you have to
call a cat a ‘cat’. It is unlikely, however,
that you will call it a ‘dog’.”
A less serious threat to the efficiency of a language
is the association of more than one signifiants with the same signifié. Corresponding to polysemy, there is polyonymy illustrated by suppletion
and other cases of anomalous non-contrastive alternation where we pretend that
we do not have more than one signifiant. When we run out of reasons to justify this claim, we admit that
we have a set of synonyms on our hands. In
the case of synonymy, however, the principle of necessity finally reasserts itself
to the extent that the synonymy is imperfect, which it almost always is.
Indeed if a language does come up with perfect synonyms, historical change
usually saves the situation by a process of semantic differentiation.6
3. The duality of patterning. This is the well-known “double articulation
linguistique” (MARTINET, 1949). At this
point we have to give up the simple antithesis of signifiant and signifié and have three terms—the phonetic
form plays the signifiant to the grammatical form which in turn plays a similar
role to the ultimate signifié. The utterance is organized and interpretable
at two levels—as a phonologic sequence and as a grammatical sequence. The syntagmatic alignments or “cuts” and the
paradigmatic alignments of “sames” and “differents” will differ at the two levels.
The minimum or simplex meaningful forms are independent of each other as
to their overt shape.7 If they are not so independent, ether the so-called
meaningful minimums are complex or the so-called meaningless minimums (phonemes
or components) are not in fact meaningless. The very possibility of setting up
two kinds of units will have to be denied.
The principle of dual patterning can be indirectly illuminated
by giving an example of a symbolism that is not so patterned— the written mathematical
notation. Here we have to learn the overt
shape for each meaningful minimum—“one”, “plus”, “equals”, etc.—independently.
There is no way of reinterpreting 1, +, =, etc., as patternings of units
of another ‘lower’ level.
3.1. Marginal exceptions. The principle of duality may be threatened
in either of two ways. First, there may
be an incipient conflation of the two levels into one. TOGEBY (1951, p. 30) defines ‘morphophonemes’
as solidary or inseparable combinations of a unit of expression and a unit of
content—“the phoneme of modulation is always accompanied by a particular morpheme
of modulation and is unable to express any other, and the morpheme of modulation
likewise cannot be expressed in any other way” (translation mine) 8.
Although it may be seriously doubted whether things are so simple with French
intonations, which TOGEBY is describing at this point, it is easy to see how this
kind of situation can come about with junctures, contours, and the like as opposed
to vocoids, non-vocoids, coarticulations, tones, and the like.
Some such consideration seems to have motivated JAKOBSON to accord a special
status to such features—they are either configurative or expressive features but
not the ordinary distinctive features characterizing vocoids and the like (JAKOBSON
and HALLE, 1956, § 2.3). I do not see
why the three have to be mutually exclusive classes of features: I see no difficulty
in envisaging the same given features as entering into more than one function—the
details varying from language to language.
A more convincing case for a direct hook-up, so to say,
between the significant and the signifié
can be made out for tactical features as opposed to quotable (or at least isolable)
morpheme-shapes. BLOOMFIELD (1933, pp.
166, 264) tried to establish a distinction between the meaningless taxeme and
the meaningful tagmeme to match the phoneme and the morpheme respectively.
It is certainly no accident that this attempt has hitherto remained a mere
curiosity in the history of linguistics. More
to our purpose will be his definition of irregularity (1933, p. 274): “any form
which a speaker can utter only after he has heard it from other speakers is irregular.”
To the extent that tactical patterns or analogies prevail over irregularities
or anomalies, the SEMIOSIS is DIRECT rather than MEDIATED.
To the extent that irregularities detract from the signaling reliability
of a tactical pattern, duality breaks in and the grammar stands in need of being
rounded off by a lexicon of such anomalies.
Secondly, the duality principle may be called into question
because of incipient fissions of the two levels into more than two.
Let us look at the grammatical level first.
It has become amply clear by now that BLOOMFIELD’S definition of the morpheme
as the minimum meaningful unit proves to be unworkable in practice.
Empty morphs (for instance, some stem-formatives) do not commute with anything,
even with their own absence; some morph resemblances (MARTIN, 1952, Ch. 16) (like
crash, crush, dash; snide, sneer, side; or see, sight in English,
or /lomb-, lomkәḷ-, oḷkhәmb-, oḷәmba, hindkәḷ-/, etc., in Marathi9
do not quite add up to morphemes but have an undoubted nuisance value; the meaningfulness
of derivative suffixes is often questionable, yet calling them morphemes seems
to make sense; unique constituents (like cran- in cran-berry) render
their partners redundant—all such ‘aberrant’ cases arouse precisely those ‘suspicions’
that BAZELL takes care to allay (see fn. 7 above) in speaking of typical morphemes.
So if we try to find a way out of this difficulty by suitably redefining
‘morpheme’ and renaming BLOOMFIELD’S meaningful minimum, say as ‘idiom’ (cf. HOCKETT,
1956, 1958), we are face to face with three levels—the phonologic, the morphemic
or grammatical, and the semantic.10
At
the phonologic end of the semiotic chain, we have JAKOBSON’S treatment (JAKOBSON
and HALLE, 1956 and elsewhere) of distinctive features. If we are justified in
regarding components (as he seems to) as distinctive primarily of phonemes and
only secondarily of utterances (I think the reverse is true), then we have a splitting
up of the phonologic level into two—the componential and the phonemic.11
The
multiplication of levels entails a multiplication of THRESHOLDS OF LAWFULNESS
OR WELL-FORMEDNESS in language. The
phonologically lawful (‘pronounceable’), the grammatically lawful (‘correct’,
‘grammatical’), and the semantically lawful (‘makes sense’, ‘usable’) would then
seem to be successively less inclusive classes.12
So
long as we have more than one level (whether two or three or more), we can say
that the sign-system has mediated semiosis.
4.
Interrelations of the three principles.13 Arbitrariness and mediated
semiosis are logically independent—that is, one can be present or absent in the
presence or absence of the other. Arbitrary but one-level sign-systems are common
enough: traffic lights and written mathematical symbolism (see § 3 above) are
good examples. Non-arbitrary sign-systems
with more than one level are also found. Stick figures are iconic likely ordinary line-drawings, but unlike
the latter they are simple combinations of a limited number of isolates.
This two-level patterning is what makes them easily reproducible.
Another example would be a medical system in which all disorders are diagnosed
in terms of combinations of a few basic symptoms, so that symptoms reveal disorders,
which in turn ‘indicate’ certain remedies. Here what renders the system non-arbitrary
is not iconism but ‘natural’ cause-and –effect relations.
Cross-linguistic
arbitrariness and intra-linguistic necessity are mutually independent and not
incompatible (as BENVENISTE, 1939, seems to have wrongly thought).
Necessity
and mediation are independent too. If the two levels—the ‘lower’ (phonologic,
expression, cinematic) and the ‘higher’ (grammatic, content, plerematic)—are compared
as to the operation of necessity (the avoidance of many-to-one or one-to-many
semiotic relationships), the lower one on the whole seems to score better.
It is interesting to note, in this connection, that in much historical
reasoning, especially in internal reconstruction, there seems to be a tacit assumption
that earlier stages tend to have a ‘cleaner’ allophonics and morphophonemics. Historical changes muddy the water, so to speak, and we are left
with highly dissimilar allophones, intersection of phonemes, suppletion, homonymy,
and similar other complications and aberrations on our hands. I think that this assumption needs to be looked
into; it is not probably as naive as it sounds.
The
joint consequence of arbitrariness and duality is that every morpheme shape is
an irregularity (cf. BLOOMFIELD, 1933, p. 274)—the speaker cannot make it up for
himself without introducing a linguistic change, that is, without modifying the
threshold of lawfulness. On the other hand, ideally there is no room
for irregularity at supra-morphemic size-levels, no place for supra-morphemic
units as entries in a lexicon. All complex
forms should be at the dispensation of the tactical code (the principle of necessity)
without falling back upon the lexical listing (the principle of arbitrariness).
The linguist’s uneasiness is greater in accepting tactical homonymy and
tactical perfect synonymy than in accepting homonymous morphemes and morpheme
alternants—and his instinct is well-founded.14
A
word of clarification about the relation between the ‘lower-level’ units, say,
phonemes, and the ‘higher-level’ units, morphemes, is perhaps in order at this
point. Nothing in what we have said so
far implies that the morpheme—or more accurately, the morph, its correlate at
the ‘lower’ level—has to be ‘longer’ than the phoneme (or at least as long).
Typically, however, morphs are longer than unit phonemes in natural languages
and this has led some to the mistaken idea that morphemes (sic!) are in some sense
‘composed of’ phonemes. By itself a morpheme
is a Euclidean point—it has a (linear) position but no magnitude. The distinction
between the morpheme and the morph is fundamental.
Again, nothing in what we have said so far implies that the ‘lower-level’
minimal units are few in number, while the ‘higher-level’ minimal units are rather
numerous. It so happens, however, that this is the case
with natural languages and plays an important part in their economy.15
5.
A fourth property? The reader who has patiently followed us so far must no
doubt have been impressed more by the marginal exceptions and deviations than
by the principles themselves. It is a part of the linguistic field-worker’s
training to learn to reconcile oneself with the discrepancy between what ‘ought’
or ‘ought not’ to occur and what does actually occur and not impatiently conclude
that the information is either stupid or obstinate.
The disappointment of logicians and logical semanticians with natural languages
is well-known, though some of them are more graceful about it and speak of the
open texture of natural languages.
That
indeed seems to be the wiser part. Rather than blame these inconvenient exceptions
and discrepancies entirely on the imperfections of our formulations or the incompleteness
of the corpus, we may perhaps do well to dignify them as consequences of a single
principle, namely, that all grammars leak, that language is not merely changeful,
shifty, subject to dialect variation, but also fundamentally crude, makeshift,
messy.16 (Thus crudity, let me repeat, is more than either linguistic
change or dialect variation. These two do not render the postulation of
an ideally well-behaved language impossible but merely pose a challenge to our
ingenuity.17)
By
so recognizing crudity as a fundamental property, we are to that extent rescuing
linguistic analysis from the hazards of the linguist’s temperament.
He may have his passion for or horror of tidiness—but he has to accept
crudity: his business is to find out just how crude a language is, 18
and how best he can cope with it.
6.
Methodological implications. There is an unfortunate tendency to divorce
the discussion of the fundamental properties of language (SAUSSURE’S language)
and the discussion of the traits of specific languages (SAUSSURE’S langue). As a consequence both suffer. The former gains a reputation (often justifiably
so) of being armchair philosophy, debates in vacuo, or just a textual criticism
of SAUSSURE. The latter, aiming
to concern itself with the practical business of describing a language (practical,
indeed!), degenerates into myopic shoptalk.
What
is exactly the status of these predications about language? Are they descriptions
of general properties? Assumptions underlying our methods of investigation (discovery),
presentation, and validation (evaluation)? Elements
in the definition of language? Assertions
of language universals, inseparable accidents? We cannot even begin to answer
these questions here. We shall have to
wait, presumably, till we get around to a comprehensive typology of sign-systems.19
The
first three principles (and possibly a few others) are the unspoken assumptions
underlying many of the analyst’s intuitions about some of the familiar cruxes
of descriptive analysis. At the minimum, the principles will help us
realize why suppletion, homonymy, zero, intersection of phonemes, idioms, intonations,
and the like make us uneasy or cautious in the first place, why they are cruxes
at all.
The
most interesting methodological problems, however, are those raised by the crudity
principle—especially as they concern the presenting of the results of our investigation
for the inspection of others. Broadly,
we may say, if language is messy, fuzzy-edged, crude, let our description of it
be answeringly messy, precisely vague, and not inaccurately precise.
CHOMSKY’S suggestion (1957, Ch. 2, fn. 2; Ch. 5, fn. 2) that we recognize
degrees of grammaticalness (read: lawfulness at the grammatical level) is thus
a step in the right direction (cf. Also HARWOOD, 1955). The counsel of despair which makes a fetish
of attestation is certainly not the wiser way of facing crudity—a form may be
lawful and yet remain unattested and vice versa. (In the latter event, the form may be explained as a slip of the
tongue, imperfect mastery of the code, playful flouting of the code, a citation
in a metalinguistic discourse, and the like).
Another
counsel of despair is that co-existent sub-systems (read: rival or competing thresholds
of lawfulness) be recognized at the drop of a hat.20 This device, if
not handled too carefully, is apt to run counter to the principle of intra-linguistic
necessity. For, to the extent that one sub-system sanctions
a form rejected by a rival sub-system, we are beginning to have linguistic reasons
why the given signifié should be correlated with a different significant and vice
versa.
7.
Conclusion. To conclude, the necessity and mediation principles tell us why
we should not despair of describing languages; the crudity principle (or the crudity
caveat, if you like) tells why we should not be too confident (as American linguists
generally are, when not at their best) or too ambitious (as the glossematicians,
who end up by not writing any grammars at all); the mediation and crudity principles
tell us why we human beings do not despair of being able to talk about this multifarious,
bewildering, contingent world of ours.
REFERENCES CITED
BAZELL,
Charles E., 1949. On the problem of the
morpheme. Archivum linguisticum
1: 1-15.
BENVENISTE,
Emile, 1939. Nature du signe linguistique.
Acta ling. 1: 1. 23-9.
BLOCH,
Bernard, 1948. A set of Postulates for phonemic analysis.
Lang. 24. 3-46.
BLOOMFIELD,
Leonard, 1933. Language. New York:
Holt.
BOLINGER,
Dwight L., 1948. On defining the morpheme. Word
4. 18-23.
------,
1950. Rime, assonance and morpheme analysis. Word 6. 117-36.
CHOMSKY,
Noam, 1957. Syntactic structures. The Hague: Mouton.
FIRTH,
J. R., 1935. The technique of semantics. Trans. Of Philol.
Soc. 1935, 36-72.
(Reprinted
in Firth, 1957 a.)
------,
1957 a. Papers in linguistics 1934-1951. London: Oxford University Press.
------,
1957 b. Synopsis of linguistic theory. Contributed
to: Studies in linguistic analysis.
Oxford:
Blackwell.
FRIES,
C. C., and PIKE, K. L.. 1949. Coexistent phonemic systems.
Lang. 25. 29-50.
GARVIN,
Paul L., 1957. On the relative tractability of morphological data. Word 13. 12-
23.
GREENBERG,
J. H., 1957. Essays in linguistics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
HARWOOD,
F. W., 1955. Axiomatic syntax: the construction and evaluation of a
syntactic
calculus. Lang. 31. 409-13.
HOCKETT,
C. F., 1956. Idiom formation. In: For Roman Jakobson.
The Hague:
Mouton, 222-9.
HOCKETT,
C. F., 1958. A course in modern linguistics. New
York: Macmillan.
JAKOBSON,
Roman, 1936. Beitrag zur allgemeinen Kausslehre: Gesamtbedeutung
der
russischen Kasus. TCLP
6. 240-88.
------,
1953. Participant in: Lévi-Strauss, C., et al. (edd.),
Results of the Conference of
anthropologists
and linguists, Ind. Univ. Publ. in Anthr.
And Ling., Memoir 8, see Index.
------,
and Halle, Morris, 1956. Fundamentals
of language. The Hague: Mouton.
JOOS,
Martin, (ed.), 1957. Readings in linguistics……Washington:
ACLS.
MARTIN,
Samuel E., 1952. Morphophonemics of standard
colloquial Japanese. Lang.
Diss.
47.
MARTINET,
André, 1949. La double articulation linguistique.
In: Reherches
structurales
(= TCLC 5), 30-8.
Patañjali. Mahābhāṣya (‘The Great Commentary’
on Pānini, ed. by KIELHORN). [My
translation
is based on the English tr. in P.S. Subrahmanya SASTRI, Lectures, vol.
1, 1960 and the Marathi tr. by MM. Vasudevshastri ABHYANKAR, Vol. 1, 1938.]
SAPIR,
Edward, 1921. Language. New York: Harcourt, Brace.
SAUSSURE,
Ferdinand de, 1916. Cours de linguistique
gnrale, 1st ed. Paris: Payot.
SCHRECKER,
Paul, 1948. Work and history: An Essay on the structure
of civilization.
Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
TOGEBY,
Knud, 1951. Structure immanente de la
langue franiçase (= TCLC 6).
Copenhagen: Nordisk Sprog- go Kulturforlag.
WELLS,
Rulon S., 3d, 1947. De SAUSSURE’S system
of linguistics. Word 3. 1-31.
(Reprinted in Joos (ed.), 1957, pp. 1-31.)
COLOPHON
This was published in Indian Linguistics
25: 83-92, 1964 (published 1965).
3. The ancient
Indian grammarians of Sanskrit thought fit to announce this refusal much earlier
– when the word (pada) was
reached. Patañjali bluntly tell us (Mahābhāṣya 1. 1.3 apud Pānini 1.1.1,
vārtt. 7, Kielhorn’s ed., vol.
1, p.39 ii. 16-19): “The restrictions of usage (proyoganiyama) are not
taken up here. What then? Words are formed and formed endlessly here.
They are put together in any way thought proper-as in, āhara pātram
[fetch (imper.) vessel accus. Sg.)] or pātram āhara.”
7. Compare the first half of the GREENBERG quotation
is § 2.1 above. Cf. also BAZELL (1949,
p. 9), who points out that morphemes are typically “not suspect either of being
divisible into signs or being only parts of signs.” BOLINGER (1948, 1950) is full of precisely
such suspicions.
8. This use of the term morphophonéme has
of course nothing to do with the
usual
American use of morphophoneme.
9. Meaning respectively ‘hang (intr.) as a part
of’, ‘hang (intr,) by attachment’, ‘(of person or limb) swing and exert pull by
weight’, ‘plumb-level’, ‘(of liquid in a container) be disturbed by the irregular
movements of the container’.
10. Translating this revision into HJELMSLEV’S
terms will yield the following scheme:
expression-substance (phonetics)
expression-form (phonology)
content-form1 (grammar)
content-form2 (semology)
content-substance (semantics)
Presumably, content-form1 (grammar) will be Janus-faced and
phonology and semology will be substances to grammar but forms to phonetics and
semantics.
11.
I think, however, that components constitute an alphabet for writing phonologic
forms and not merely phonemes. In that
case two allophones may differ componentially on occasion and so intersection
of phonemes may be tolerated. The difference
between the component and the phoneme will be merely one of size-level like that
between the morpheme and the word. Size-levels are in some sense less fundamental
than levels of semiotic mediation. The
recent devaluation of the morphology-syntax division is justified.
Unfortunately the term level has become a vogue word and been subjected
to careless use.
12.
So that colourless green ideas sleep furiously as also sincerity
admires John (CHOMSKY, 1957, § 2.3 and fn. 7 to § 5.4) will cross the
grammatical threshold but fail at the semantic threshold. This tallies well with the often-heard informant
response : “Sure, you could say that, there is nothing against it, but
we just don’t, it doesn’t mean anything.”
The term canonical could now
be defined as morphophonemically lawful or well-formed-provided we keep in mind
the essentially secondary status of morphophonemics as compared to the three primary
levels.
The term well-formed is borrowed
from modern logic. For the term lawfulness
I am indebted to Paul SCHRECKER’S
Work and history (1948, see Index). Linguistic lawfulness has closer affinities
to lawfulness in the everyday sense than to conformity to ‘natural law’—something
we have lost sight of in decrying prescriptive grammar. Morris SWADESH’S glottochronologic hypothesis,
if substantiated, would be a true example of a natural law and be applicable to
parole and not langue.
13.
The ancient dispute between anamolists and analogists rests on an incomplete
analysis. The three principles present
three antitheses:
(i)
arbitrary : motivated (whether iconically or otherwise)
(ii)
necessary : asymmetrical
(iii)
mediated semiosis : immediate semiosis
It is true that there is some degree
of polarization here between ‘arbitrary’, ‘asymmetrical’, and ‘mediated’ on the
one hand (all defeat analogy) and ‘motivated’, ‘necessary’, and ‘immediate’ on
the other (all promote analogy). But this cannot be simplified into a single antithesis. We have to find our way to a more adequate
formulation. For instance, the relation
between the third antithesis and analogy is probably to be formulated as follows:
mediated semiosis arises in order to mitigate anomaly, while perfect analogy actually
renders any further mediation unnecessary.
14.
But the uneasiness should not be tantamount to refusal. JAKOBSON’S attempts (1936) to force all the
disparate uses of a case into a single formula (the Gesamtbedeutung) seem to stem
from a mistaken belief that we should keep grammar at least (tactics and marker
morphemes) clean of asymmetrical hook-ups between the significant and the signifié.
That is the privilege of the speakers of the language and not of the linguistic
analyst.
15. Two-level sign-systems that depart from this picture are not, however,
difficult to find. In Morse code, for
instance, both kinds of units are limited in number.
16.
Cf. SAPIR, 1921, Ch. 2, p. 39, Firth, 1935, pp. 70-1,
footnote.
17. Consider in this connection
BLOCH’S definition of the ‘idiolect’: ‘The totality of the possible uttearances
of one speaker at one time in using a language to interact with one other speaker
is an idiolect” (1948, § 1.7). SAUSSURE’S uneasiness in reconciling diachrony and synchrony is
also understandable (cf. WELLS’ 1947, §§ 32-4). The fact is that there is a sort of built in ethnocentrism in language
that regards what is spoken here and now as alone right.
18. Whether languages differ in the degree of crudity is a moot question,
Cf. GARVIN, 1957.
19.
Cf. HOCKETT,
1958, § 64.3
20. Cf. FIRTH (1957a, passim; 1957b) on ‘polysystematic’ analysis; FRIES
and PIKE, 1949; JACKOBSON on ‘code-switching’ as a routine fact of language (1953,
pp. 16-7, 36 ff.).
