CLS 29 Volume 2: The Parasession What We Think, What We Mean, and How We Say It: Papers from the Parasession on the Correspondence of Conceptual, Semantic and Grammatical Representations 1993 Compiled and edited by Katharine Beals Gina Cooke David Kathman Sotaro Kita Karl-Erik McCullough David Testen319 Of dynamos and doorbells: semiotic modularity and the (over}determination of cognitive representation Michae} Silverstein ‘The University of Chicago It is somewhat as though a ay- namo capable of generating e~ nough power to run an elevator Were operated alnost exclu- sively to feed an electric doorbell. --E. Sapir (1921(1949}:24) Linguists ought especially to take account of what Sapir pointed out in the passage of Language from which the quotation above is taken. In it, he tries to relate our Tinguistic analyses of grammar to the "gamut of psychic uses" with which the realtime "flow" of linguistic tokens is bound up. Thus, Sapir points out, simplifying somewhat, “the typical linguistic element labels a concept," under our usual assumptions about the abstract objects called grammars. The generated pairings of linguistic form and content that constitute the putative mental representations of our grammars, Sapir says, work from "the highest latent or potential content of speech, the content that is obtained by interpreting each of the elements in the flow of language as possessed of its very fullest conceptual value," notwithstanding the fact that "(w]e are not in ordinary life So much concerned with concepts as such as with concrete particularities and specific relations" (1921(1949}:14-15)-~ meaning here the contextual ization of linguistic performance in textualized reference and modalized predication, and in the social situations in which this takes place. And in many ways, as Sapir points out, "the state of mind...in which abstract concepts and their relations are alone at the focus of attention and which is ordinarily terned reasoning," is the imagined (and imaged) embodiment of our grammatical working assumptions as they would emerge in realtine performance, were that psychologically possible. Now Sapir’s point is, of course, that language-in-use might look, shall we say, cognitively "degenerate" from the point of view of our granmarian’s account of the maximal conceptual power implicit in forn-content pairings as cognitive representations relevant to language processing. Yet even the maximally degenerate use of language, has, in part, its own order of factuality, being the "symbolic’... rend{ition of situation) in the grooves of habitual expression." Thus for Sapir’s example of someone's saying in a characteristic social situation "I had a good breakfast this morning," he observes "Each element in the sentence320 defines a separate concept or conceptual relation or both combined, but the sentence as a whole has no conceptual significance whatever" (1921(1949}:14). At first a seeming paradox, the point becomes clear, I think, if we understand the framework in which Sapir/s observations were made as part of our more contemporary view of the semiotic modularity of linguistic signals, their potentially multiple framings as meaningful signs in semiotie-functional terms. In such a view, achieving at least one consequential realtine mapping that interrelates the semiotic modalitios constitutes the psychological problem of language-in-use. lence, we face such questions as the degree of determinacy of cognitive representations necessary in any one or more of the semiotic modalities Implied by the structure and use of language so as to enable various consequences, cognitive, interactional, etc. In particular, we face the question of the correctness of the almost universal assumption -- certainly anong linguists ~~ that at the heart of language production and comprehension is a psychological mechanism for achieving a full, multi- planar formal ropresentation of a sentence or equivalent formal unit, and its pairing with some one, computibly determinate cognitive representation of its “meaning,” its “logical form," its "semantic interpretation," or whatever euch a putatively complete corresponding object is termed. one can be agnostic on the question of how this pairing of two such objects, form and meaning, is precisely describable; the’connonly held belief is that at the heart of any "use" of Language -- performing-in-realtine -- is the achievement of this kind of double representation, by accessing knowledge of linguistic form-meaning pairings -- a particular kind of competence -- though the details of the actual process involved differ among specific accounts, to the extent they are addressed at all. Such a realm of representation Seens to be what Sapir is pointing out as "the highest latent or potential content. of speech," and I wish here to clarify first his view of language structure in terms of the problen of cognitive representations, before going on to see its role in a semiotic-nodular view of language-in-use. 1 shall tern Sapir’s view of language structure (as also Bloomfield’s view, and indeed the view of every pre-post-Bloomfieldian Linguist in America or in Europe one could cite) the (axammaticosemantic) ceding view of structure, and first develop the outlines of this framework so as to reach certain conclusions about the psychological utility of putatively complete forn-meaning pairings ‘The coding view of structure Like every major tradition of grammatical analysis, the coding view tries to establish a systematic relationship, that is, a specific mapping, between contextually~ abstractable and systematically scheatized linguistic forme 321 and whatever the existence of these forms entails about differential reference-and-modalized-predication. Such entailments are themselves commonly spoken of as “conceptual schemata,“ as note Sapir's use of the terms, (separate) soncept, conceptual, conceptual relation (=concept with certain nonlocalized coding correlates in linguistic form) Notwithstanding this usage, we need not be confused: we need not take Use of this term as an index of our belief in naive conceptualism -- Quine's (1968:186) “museum” theories of meaning -- that locates quote-concepts-unquote in a mental realm unpermeable to social-level facts, in all their messy historical and dialectical contingency. Such a Cartesian world, or actually such an inner Platonic world, is familiar to us in much cognitivist projection. As we will develop below, the direct analogy taken from philosophical discourse -- probably via Carnap and Chomsky - = of natural language sentence-forms as uninterpreted logical-syntactic formulae, and a complete "semantic representation" or equivalent of those linguistic formulae as their structure of truth-conditions relative to the compositionality of formulae, is not an essential commitment of the coding view. ‘The critical methodological question in the coding view is, "How is such-and-such differentiable concept -- of course, specified as differentiable from among others in a particularly-structured universe of possibilities -- how is such a concept specifically and differentially signaled in language form?" That is, what is the formally- characterizable expression of such-and-such conceptual differentiation? Note that the coding relationship we are after may be multiple in both directions, with many different means of differential coding for a given differential conceptual value, and vice-versa. Indeed, the whole first part (chapters II-VI) of Sapir's little book is aimed at showing the independence of "form" and "meaning" in the specific sense of the multiplicity of meanings that any formal category-type or construction-type bears both within and across languages. And contrariwise the book shows the multiplicity of formal expression, both within and across languages, that any differential concept has. This is the coding view's "take" on the matter of relative arbitrariness in language, the limits to which in the realm of grammatical structure it is happy to encounter as empirical fact, and attempt to explain with grounded theoretical constructs and methodological expectations. ‘The asyumetry of coding. As it turns out, it is impossible to carry out the program of the coding view stated in these terms, since it is impossible to know anything about the nature of differential conceptual values independent of some coding relationship(s). Hence, if we see coding as a structure linking our ultimate goal of methodologically *independent" variables of differential conceptual values to methodologically “dependent” variables of differential linguistic forms, the only way we know of322 conceptual values is through the regularity of the codings, this regularity becoming the fundamental assumption, ontic commitment about, and object of inquiry. We thus posit the existence of structures of grammatical categories, the internal organization and interrelationships of which are the center of interest. Two types of categorial structure. Cutting to the finish, and incorporating the contributions to the enterprise of Saussure and Bloomfield in particular, several specific conclusions and projects emerge here. First, ronal catsoaRies are categories of form, that we can hold to the criterion of characterizability purely in terms of mutual distributional relations. Such notions as defining the "Subject" of a larger syntactic construction terms limited to facts of configurationality of hierarchical constituency of a distributional position with respect to other, mutually distributed categories, are formal definitions in this sense, definitions determining formal categories purely in terms of arrangements of them in relation to other formal categories. This is the practical face of the thesis of the radical autonomy of form, or radical asymmetry of the forin-meaning distinction, in which realizing that we cannot study the putative *concepts™ or *meanings" or "truth conditions” directly, some scholars have proposed that in principle we must study only form (akin to the priority of logical formulae within Carnapian syntactic calculus, which is in principle autonomous with respect to its "interpretive" logical semantics and even more to its pragmatics). It was Bloomfield who first articulated the correlative structural-functional conclusion, that if language can be completely and consistently described in strictly formal- categorial terms, then the “function* of any linguistic for is given by its distributional possibilities, however complexly these are to be described within the whole language. And of course to the extent that we cay so describe the structure not only of some particular language, but in principled terms, the possible structures of ali languages, we have a complete "formal" account ~~ i.e., an account of linguistic form purely in terms of linguistic form-categories -- that might even be formalized in the sense intended by the term "generative* grammar. We might, however, have to fall back on a partial structural- functionalism, in which we try to separate -- or modularize == those aspects of linguistic structure that seem to be amenable to purely formal-categorial characterization, fron various other types of undeniably formal patterning, but patterning the regularity of which seems to require other kinds of explanatory strategies. In the current jargon, such other possibilities have been termed * functional” explanations, though of course structural-functional explanations are no less functional; they merely locate the function in the criterion of distributional structure under certain assumptions about parsing formulae. 323 We are in fact familiar, from the current literature, with the problens involved in trying to formalize a purely formal-categorial account of grammar. There are trade-offs necessary in the positing of formal categories whose distributional properties are driven by -- or at least a function of -- assumptions about restrictions on types of constituency (for example, uniquely binary-branching and headed) and on significant classes of variant constituencies (as are generated by "movement rules," for example). Many formal categories necessary to such an account have turned out to be unrealized in any surface distribution (so-called Wenpty categories," for example), and are the clearest cases of Bloomfield’s structural-functional hypothesis, since ‘their distributions are only indirectly manifested in the distributions of what we might term, with Bloomfield and his successors, lexical forms. (Observe that the concept of lexical form is a grammatical term, involving non-null surface phrasal projections of specific formal categories; the lexicon of a language, let us recall, is a determinate part of ite grammar.) lence note the sense of theoretical triumph surrounding the well-argued-for empty category as a part of “universal formal grammar, since it implies that to the extent its formal-categorial basis is a mental reality, thie mental structure is at the very least actively constructed in language acquisition, probably on specific structural-functional principles. ‘Types of grammatical categories. It is important not to confuse such formal categories with the GRAMMATICAL CATEGORIES of languages, which are recognized by how specific formal expression-types (sometimes partly or wholly characterizable in formal-categorial terms) can be regularly mapped onto differentially communicable values in structured semiotic universes. Even with default structural- functionalist methodological commitments, we look for gramnatical categories with additional criteria. We presuppose, for example, that there obtain, by degrees, universality and comparability across the attested languages of the world (anong which we always make at least implicit typological comparisons) that ground any specific linguistic analysis in a structured universe of possibly-distinguishea gramnatical categories recognizable by their "signatures" in formal categorial structure, the structure of linguistic form. We expect that certain grammatical category types cluster in recurrent arrangements of formal categorial structure, which become diagnostic of them by virtue of the veracity of such expectations. In many attemptedly formal- categorial (and self-styled "formalist") accounts of Linguistic structure, grammatical categories are in fact informally and nonchalantly snuck in in the choice of labels for particular nodes in constituency-diagrams and their equivalent, or in various principles of putatively formal- categorial arrangement, or in the de facto limitation of certain principles and'rules of distribution to only certain Classes of categorial organization. (That many contemporary324 Linguists do not realize that they are confused about formal and grammatical categorization probably is a result of the post-Bloomfieldian -- specifically 2. Harris (1942;1945). -- and ever-after misreading of Language (e.g., 1933:218 on so- called secondary morpheme words).) Such smuggling of a theory of grammatical categories into a purportedly formalist theory of formal categories does neither aspect of the problem of linguistic coding well In fact, it is on the very relationship between formal categories and grammatical categories that the coding view attempts to theorize. (Sapir calls the latter "grammatical concepts," by the way, emphasizing both poles of the mapping between grammar ~- form -- and differential sense-structure == "meaning.") There are several different kinds of relationships that can immediately be identified, each with its own kind of implication for a theory of cognitive representations and their intentional vs. automatic generation and processing by speakers/hearers of languages (and note the distinct sense of "generate" here, speaking of actual real time mental happenings, not structural conditions on the autonomy of formal categorial relations) In the easiest situation to recognize, a grammatical category is always isolable as such in a particular lexical form, for example an affix or clitic or other type of syntactically-distributed single-lexical form. Observe that formal phrasal head-types, so-called “lexical categories" in some theoretical discourses, are also organized by ~~ generally cross-cutting -- grammatical categories insofar as their formal distributions are a correlative function of such class-membership. Such a grammatical category is highly localizable with respect to a system of formal- categorial organization based on the principles of hierarchical concatenative constituency relations, and, if always bearing its unique coding relationship wherever its corresponding formal category occurs, it is robust across all distributional possibilities with respect to other grammatical categories, independent of them in formal categorial coding. In’practice, there is a trivial sense of localizable grammatical categorization, in that every recurring lexical form in a language constitutes ite own idiosyncratic (and very semantically complex!) grammatical category-complex, with questionable grounding in universal comparability, absent further assumptions In the normal linguistic situation, where we recognize complex constituency relationships anong formal categories, it turns out that grammatical categories interact one with another in characteristic ways, both in terms of which categories characteristically interact, and what formal- categorial expression of these interactions can be recognized. Morphological paradigns most vividly express one such interaction, simultaneous multivariate coding in single lexical forms (syncretism of grammatical categories), where sets of distinct lexical forms, e.g., affixes, are, in effect the dependent coding values filling the cells of 325 dimensionalized natrices of granmatical categorial arrays, which diagram the structure of semantic variables in this case. Here, of course, systematic mutual neutralizations occur with characteristic regularities (much of the earlier typological literature has been concerned with elaborating such regularities in the world’s languages), and illuminate the relationships of grammatical categories. Observe that syntactic-plane paradigms of grammatical categories also For all other kinds of coding, we need to invoke the distinctness of formal categories and granmatical categories in a more specific way. First, we must recognize that morphological pieces of lexical form can, from their (structural-) functional roles, be codings of grammatical categories that must be “attached to," in the sense of functionally associated with the grammatical categories of, hierarchically superordinate or syntagnatically disjoint lexical scopes or projections, notwithstanding the formal categorial distributional appearance. (Though also, following Harris and others, completely mixing up the two kinds of category-types ~~ glaringly, for example, in the analysis of verbal auxiliation -- Chomsky’s (1957) very originary "transformational" assault-by-denonstration on Markov and phrase-structure grammars, which he must have attributed to all other theorists, rested completely on facts of this sort in English grammar.) Note that so-called ‘Noun of Agency’ and related affixes in many languages are formally affixed to Verb Stems or Themes, though they are a grammatical category of Clause vs. Phrase derivational relationship. (Note how all kinds of formal categorial relations of the clause are carried over intact, or in determinately-derived form, in the corresponding phrase.) In effect, everything except the affix in such an example constitutes a formal categorial configuration, which may or may not be a fornally-identified "constituent in any reasonable way even if one might want to argue that the Verb gets the phrasal Affix because it gets the inflectional machinery of the Clause (but in many fornal-categorial accounts is not the head of the clause, note). But the important point is that the formal-categorial structure internal to the configuration, and the formal categorial labels that define its formally superordinate lexical scope or projection according to formal-categorial analysis, are both involved in specifying that this is a derivational paradigm (Clause and corresponding Phrase), and hence are all necessary to describing the coding relationship here of a grammatical category. Conversely, it is uniquely the fact of grammatical categoriality of, say, Noun of Agency, that. seems to justicy this analysis, notwithstanding the fact that what is COMMON material in both Clause-level fornal- categorial structure and Phrase-level fornal-categorial structure docs not form a fornal-categorial constituent of any sort justifiable on purely formal-categorial grounds (other than the facts of derivation that is, to be precise).