EntranceThe structure of linguistics (linguistics) as a science. Logical structure of linguistic theory
6.1. In §§ 3.4 two models of linguistic structure are described: a simple communication-theoretical model and a formalized version of the analysis based on the components themselves. Both of them turned out to be inadequate, and in § 5 I proposed a stronger model, combining the level of direct constituents and grammatical transformations, which is intended to compensate for the shortcomings of the previous models. Before exploring this possibility, I would like to clarify some of the background points underlying the method of this study.
Central to the present discussion of linguistic structure is the problem of the justification of grammars. The grammar of the language L is essentially the theory of the language L. Any scientific theory, based on a finite number of observations, seeks to establish relationships between observed phenomena and predict new phenomena, formulating general laws in terms of hypothetical constructs such as (in physics, for example) “mass” and “electron”. In a similar way, the grammar of the English language is based on a finite set of statements (observations) and contains certain grammatical rules (laws), formulated in terms of specific phonemes, groups, etc., of the English language (hypothetical constructs). These rules express the structural relationships between observed sentences and the infinite number of sentences generated by the grammar independently of these observed sentences (predictions). Our task is to develop and understand the criteria for choosing the correct grammar for each language, that is, the correct theory of this language.
Two types of such criteria were mentioned in §2.1. It is clear that every grammar must satisfy certainexternal conditions of adequacy;for example, the sentences it generates must be acceptable to a natural speaker of the language. In § 8 we will consider some other external conditions of this kind. In addition, we impose on grammariansrequirement of generality;
we require that the grammar of a given language be constructed in accordance with a particular theory of linguistic structure in which such concepts as "phoneme" and "group" are defined independently of any particular language 29 . If we omit either the external conditions or the requirement of generality, we have no basis for choosing among a large number of completely different "grammars", each of which is compatible with a given set of observed utterances. But, as we noted in § 2.1, these requirements taken together represent a very strong criterion of adequacy for the general theory of linguistic structure, as well as for the set of grammars that are created on its basis for specific languages. Note that neither the general theory nor specific grammars are fixed from this point of view once and for all. Progress and revision can be achieved through the discovery of new facts concerning specific languages, or through purely theoretical insight into the organization of linguistic data, that is, the construction of new models of linguistic structure. In this concept, however, there is no circle. At any point in time, we can try to formulate with all possible accuracy both the general theory and the set of grammars associated with it, which must satisfy the empirical, external conditions of adequacy.
We have not yet considered the following very decisive question: what is the relationship between the general theory and the specific grammars that follow from it? In other words, what meaning do we give in this context to the concept “follow from”? It is at this point that our approach diverges sharply from many theories of linguistic structure.
The strongest claim that could be made on the relationship between a theory of linguistic structure and concrete grammars is that
29 These two conditions are supposed to correspond to what Hjelmslev had in mind when he spoke of the fitness and arbitrariness of linguistic theory. Wed. L.Nje1 m s 1ev, Prolegomena to a theory of language (Memoir 7, Indiana University Publications in Anthropology and Linguistics), Baltimore, 1953, p. 8 [VtranslationonRussiancm. « NewVlinguistics», issue. 1, Ed.- inforeignlit- ry, M., 1960, page. 275. - Prim. edit.]\ Vthiscommunicationscm. AlsoreasoningHockettO « metacriteria» Vlinguistics(“Two models of grammatical descnption”, ^Linguistics Today” = “Word”, 10, p. 232-233).
that the theory, based on a certain set of statements, provides a practical and automatic method for constructing grammar. We will say that such a theory provides us withprocedure For discoveries grammarian
A weaker requirement is that the theory provide a practical and automatic method for determining whether the grammar proposed for a given set of utterances is actually the best grammar for the language from which the set is taken. About such a theory, which does not affect the question of whetherHowgrammar is being constructed, we must speak of it as a theory that providesjudgment procedure about grammar.
An even weaker requirement is that, given a set of statements and two proposed grammars in, andth 2,with their help we could decide which of the grammars was better for the language from which a given set of statements was isolated. In this case we should say that the theory gives usselection procedure grammarian
All these theories can be represented graphically as follows:
a mechanism with a grammar and a set of utterances as inputs and yes and no answers as outputs indicating the correctness or incorrectness of the grammar; therefore, it is a theory that provides a procedure for judging grammar. Rice. (36 III) presents theory with grammars G 1 and G 2, as well as the entire set of statements at the input and the decision on preference G, or G 2 the output, i.e., a theory that provides a procedure for selecting grammars 30 .
From the point of view taken here it follows that it is unreasonable to demand from a linguistic theory anything more than a practical procedure for selecting grammars. In other words, we accept the last of the three positions discussed above. It is my understanding that most of the most rigorous programs in the development of linguistic theory 31 strive to satisfy the strongest of these three requirements. This means that attempts are made to formulate methods of analysis that the researcher can realistically use, if he has the time, to construct a grammar of the language starting directly from the raw data. In my opinion, it is very doubtful that this goal can be achieved in any interesting way, and I
80
The main problem will not change if we want to take non-
a large number of correct grammars instead of just one.
81
Cm.,
For example,
IN.
IN 1
OWithh, A set of postulates for phonemic
analysis"Language"24, 1948, p. 3-46; N. Chomsky, Systems
of syntactic analysis,"Journalof SymbolicLogic",18, 1953, p. 242-
256; Z. S. Harris, From phoneme to morpheme,"Language"
31, 1955, p. 190-222;hissame,Methods in structural linguistics,
Chicago, 1951; C.F.HOWithk e t t, A formal statement of morphemic
analysis"StudiesinLinguistics",10, 1952, p. 27-39;hissame,
Problems of morphemic analysis,"Language"23, 1947, p. 321-343;
R. S. W e 1 1 s, Immediate constituents,"Language"23, 1947, p. 81 -
117,
Andmanyotherwork.
Although the explicit goal of these works is
opening procedures, we often discover upon careful
careful consideration that a theory that is actually
structured, it provides only a procedure for selecting grammars. So, for example
measures, Hockett considers his task in “Aformalstatementofmorphemicanalysis"development of "formal procedures by which
you can go from the starting line to a complete description of the language system"
(page 27); but in reality it only describes some of the formal
properties of morphological analysis, and then proposes a “criterion, with
which can be used to determine the relative effectiveness
possible morphological solutions; using it, you can
choose the most effective option or several options,
equally effective, but more effective than all others” (p. 29).
I suspect that any attempt to achieve it must lead into a labyrinth of increasingly detailed and complex analytical procedures, which, however, do not answer many important questions concerning the nature of linguistic structure. I believe that by lowering our demands and setting the more modest goal of developing procedures for selecting grammars, we can focus our attention on the key problems of linguistic structure and arrive at a more satisfactory solution to them. The validity of this opinion can be verified only through the actual development and comparison of these theories. Note, however, that the weakest of these three requirements is still strong enough to ensure a highly meaningful theory that satisfies it. We know of few areas of science in which the possibility of developing a general, practical, automatic method for choosing between several theories, each of which is compatible with the available data, could be seriously considered.
Considering each of these concepts of linguistic theory, we characterized the corresponding types of procedure with the word “practical”. This vague characteristic is very important for empirical science. Suppose, for example, that we evaluate grammars according to such a simple property as length. It would then be correct to say that we have a practical procedure for selecting grammars, since we can count the number of symbols that each contains; It would also be absolutely true to say that we have a discovery procedure, since it is possible to arrange all sequences consisting of a finite number of symbols from which grammars are constructed in order of increasing length. In doing so, we could check whether each of these sequences is a grammar or not, so that we can be sure that after some finite period of time there will be a shortest sequence that satisfies the necessary requirements. However, this discovery procedure is not of the type that is desirable for those attempting to satisfy the most powerful of the requirements discussed above.
Suppose we use the word “simplicity” to refer to the set of formal properties of grammars considered for the purpose of choosing between them. A linguistic theory of the type we propose then faces three main problems. First, it is necessary to formulate precisely (if possible, with operational and behavioral tests) external criteria for the adequacy of grammars. Secondly, we must characterize the structure of grammars in a general and explicit form so that we can actually propose grammars of this type for specific languages. Third, it is necessary to analyze and define the concept of simplicity that we are going to use when choosing between grammars, each of which has the required form. Having completed the last two tasks, we are able to formulate a general theory of linguistic structure in which such concepts as “phoneme in L”, “group in L”, “transformation in L” are defined for an arbitrary language L in terms of the physical and distributive properties of utterances b and formal properties of grammars b 82. For example, we define the set of phonemes b as the set of elements that have known physical and distributional properties and appear in the simplest of the grammars proposed for b. Having such a theory, we can try to construct grammars for real languages and then decide whether the simplest grammars we propose (that is, the grammars that we are obliged to choose according to the general theory) satisfy the external conditions of adequacy. We must continue to revise our concepts of simplicity and the characteristics of the forms of grammars until the grammars selected in accordance with the theory satisfy the external conditions 83 . Note that this theory cannot tell us how to actually begin to construct the grammar of a given
82 Linguistic theory is thus formulated in a language that is a metalanguage in relation to the language in which grammars are written, and in a meta-metalanguage in relation to the language for which the grammar is constructed.
88 In fact, during the course of the study we may also revise the criteria of adequacy. This means we may decide that some of the relevant tests do not apply to grammatical phenomena. The subject of the theory is not fully defined at the beginning of the study. It is defined in part to the extent that it is possible to provide an organized and systematic description of a certain area of phenomena.
language, based on the totality of statements. However, thanks to it we can decide how to evaluate such a grammar; this theory should therefore enable us to choose between two proposed grammars.
In the previous sections of this study we dealt with the second of the three problems mentioned. We assumed that the set of grammatically correct sentences in English was given and that there was some concept of simplicity, and tried to decide what kind of grammar would exactly produce grammatically correct sentences in some simple way. Formulating this in slightly different words, we noted above that one of the concepts that needs to be defined in a general linguistic theory is “sentence in b.” The starting point for the definition should be such concepts as “observed utterance in L”, “simplicity of the grammar of L”, etc. In accordance with the above, the general theory deals with explaining the relationship between the set of grammatically correct sentences and the set of observed sentences. Our study of the structure of the first set is a preparatory study, starting from the assumption that before we can clearly characterize the indicated relation, we must know much more about the formal properties of these sets.
Below, in § 7, we will continue to consider the relative complexity of different ways of describing the structure of the English language. In particular, we will touch upon the question of whether the grammar as a whole will be simplified if we classify a certain class of sentences as nuclear or if we consider them obtained through transformations. In this way we will arrive at certain conclusions about the structure of the English language. In §8 we will show that there is independent evidence in favor of our method of choice, i.e. that simpler grammars satisfy certain external conditions of adequacy, while more complex grammars, where otherwise The question of assigning proposals to the core has been resolved; such conditions are not satisfied. The results obtained, however, remain only plausible until we give a strict definition of the concept of simplicity we use. I think that such a definition can be given, but it is not within the scope of this monograph. It is clear, however, that under any reasonable definition of "simplicity of grammar" most of the judgments about relative complexity that we come to below will still apply.
Note that simplicity is a system criterion; the only final yardstick for evaluation is the simplicity of the system as a whole. When considering particular cases, we can only record how much a particular decision affects the overall complexity. Such a criterion can only be approximate, since as a result of simplifying one part of the grammar, other parts of it may become more complex. In other words, if it turns out that simplification of one part of the grammar leads to a corresponding simplification of other parts, we can hope that we are on the right track. Below we will try to show that just the simplest transformational analysis of one class of sentences quite often paves the way to a simpler analysis of other classes.
In short, one should in no way dwell on the method of obtaining a grammar, the degree of simplicity of which is determined, for example, on how one can obtain the decomposition of the verb phrase given in § 5.3. Questions of this kind are not relevant to the research program outlined above. One can arrive at a grammar with the help of intuition, trials, all kinds of auxiliary methodological means, based on previous experience, etc. Without a doubt, it is possible to give a systematic description of many useful analysis procedures, but it is unlikely that it will be possible to formulate them sufficiently strictly, comprehensively and simply, to call it all a practical and automatic opening procedure. One way or another, this problem goes beyond the present
34 See my work"Thelogicalstructureoflinguistictheory",where methods for evaluating grammars in terms of formal properties of simplicity are considered.
We do not deny the usefulness of even partially adequate construction procedures in this particular case. They can provide the practicing linguist with a valuable aid and also lead to a small set of grammars from which the best can then be selected. The essence of our position is that linguistic theory should not be identified with a manual of useful procedures, nor should it be expected to provide us with automatic procedures for discovering grammars.
general research. Our ultimate goal is to provide an objective and formal method for selecting a grammar and comparing it with other proposed grammars. We are interested, therefore, in describing the forms of grammars (or, what amounts to the same thing, the nature of linguistic structure) and in examining the empirical consequences of adopting a particular model of linguistic structure, rather than in indicating how in principle one can arrive at the grammar of a particular language.
6.2. As soon as we abandon any intention of finding a practical procedure for discovering grammars, many problems that have been the subject of heated methodological debate simply disappear. Let's consider the problem of level independence. It was rightly pointed out that if morphemes are defined through phonemes and at the same time phonemic analysis is associated with morphological considerations, then linguistic theory comes to naught due to the logical circle. However, this interdependence of levels does not necessarily lead to a circle. In this case, we can define a “presumptive phoneme set” and a “presumptive morpheme set” and define the compatibility relation that exists between the presumptive phoneme sets and the presumptive morpheme sets. We can then define a pair consisting of a set of phonemes and a set of morphemes for a given language as a compatible pair consisting of a putative set of phonemes and a putative set of morphemes. Our compatibility relation will be based in part on considerations of simplicity, that is, we will be able to define the phonemes and morphemes of a language as presumptive phonemes and morphemes, which, incidentally, will together lead to the simplest grammar. In this way, we have a completely straightforward way of identifying interdependent levels without falling into a circular fallacy. Of course, all this still does not answer the question of how to find phonemes and morphemes in a direct, automatic way. But no other phonemic or morphological theory will really answer this direct question, and there is little reason to believe that it can be answered in any meaningful way at all. In any case, if we set ourselves a more modest goal, requiring only the development of a procedure for selecting grammars, then there will be little reason to object to the mixing of levels and it will not be difficult to avoid a circle in determining interdependent levels 35.
Many problems of morphemic analysis also receive a completely simple solution if we take the general direction described above. In trying to develop procedures for the discovery of grammars, we naturally come to the need to consider morphemes as classes of sequences of phonemes, that is, as units having a specific phonemic “composition” in some quite literal sense. This leads to interference in such well-known cases as English took /tuk/, where
85 Cm.Z.S.HAr r i s,Methodsinstructurallinguistics, Chicago, 1951 (e.g. Appendix to 7.4, Appendix to 8.2, Ch. 9, 12), which provides examples of procedures leading to interdependent levels. I think Fowler's objection to Harris's morphological procedures (cf."Language"28, 1952, b. 504-509) can be easily refuted if we formulate, without falling into a circle, the procedure proposed here. Wed. WITH. F.HOWithk e t t,A manual of phonology (Memoir 11, Indiana University PublicationsV"AnthropologyanLinguistics"),Baltimore, 1955; eGOande, Two fundamental problems in phonemics,"StudiesinLinguistics",7, 1949, p. 33;R. Jacobson,The phonemic and grammatical aspects of language and their interrelation (Proceedings of the Sixth International congress of linguists, 5-18, Paris, 1948);K. L. P ik e, Grammatical prerequisites to phonemic analysis,"Word"3, 1947, p. 155-172;hissame, More on grammatical prerequisites,"Word"8, 1952, p. 106-121,Whereis being discussedprobleminterdependencieslevels. Cm. AlsoN.WITHhOm s kat, M.HA 1 1 e, F.LukOf f, On accentand juncturein English (“For Roman Jakobson”, “s-Gravenhage,1956, p. 65-80).
Bar- HillelassertsV"Logicalsyntaxand semantics" ( cm. "Language" 30, 1954, p.230-237) that Pike's proposals can be formalized using recursive definitions. He does not substantiate this claim in detail; As for me, I believe that this path is unlikely to lead to success. Moreover, if we are satisfied with the procedure for selecting grammars, then we can construct interdependent levels using only direct definitions, as we have just seen.
The issue of the interdependence of the phoneme and morpheme levels should not be confused with the question of whether morphological information is necessary in order to read phonemic transcription. Even if morphological considerations are considered relevant to the determination of the phonemes of a language, it may nevertheless turn out that phonemic transcription provides a complete set of "reading rules" regardless of other levels. Wed.N. WITHhOm s ky,M. Halle, F.LukOf f , On accentandjuncturein English (“For Roman Jakobson”, “s-Gravenhage, 1956, p.65-80), where this issue is discussed and examples are given.
it is difficult, without resorting to artificiality, to associate any part of the word with the past tense morpheme present in the form jtl in walked /wokt/, and also as /d/ in framed /îreymd/ etc. All these problems can be avoided by treating morphology and phonology as two distinct but interdependent levels of representation, linked in grammar by morphophonemic rules like (19). So, took is presented at the morphological level in the form take+past, similar to walked can be perceived as walk+past. Morphophonemic rules (19 II) and (19 V), respectively, turn these chains of morphemes into/tuk/ and /wokt/. The only difference between the two cases is that (19 V) is a much more general rule than (19 II) 36 . If we give up the idea that higher levels are literally built from elements of lower levels (and I think we should), then it becomes much more natural to consider even such abstract systems of representation as the transformational structure (where each the utterance is represented by a sequence of transformations through which it is obtained from the terminal chain of the grammar of its immediate constituents) as a linguistic level.
|
86 Hockett gives a very clear statement of this approach to levels in"A manual of phonology", 1955, p.15.V"Two models of grammatical description" (cm. “Linguistics Todayx=“Word”, 10, 1954, p.210-233) Hockett rejects a solution very similar to the one just proposed, on the grounds that"tookAndtakepartially similar in phonemic appearance, just likebakedAndbake;they are also similar in meaning; this fact must not be overlooked” (p. 224). But the similarity of meaning is not lost on our formulation, since the morphemepastpresent in morphemic representation as wordstook"took" and the wordsbaked"pitch". The similarity of phonemic appearance can also be detected with this formulation of the morphophonemic rule, which turnstake+pastV/tuk/.Without a doubt, in a real morpheme system we will formulate this rule as: eu ->uin the contextt- k-\-past. This will allow us to simplify the grammar through a generalization that will reveal parallels betweentake"take" -took"took"shake"shake" -shook"shaked"forsake"to leave" -forsooto "left" and more generally betweenstand"stand" -stood“stood”, etc. |
Many generally accepted points of view will be untenable if we formulate our goals in the manner suggested above. Thus, it is sometimes argued that work in the field of syntactic theory is currently premature, since many problems arising at the lower level of phonetics and morphology have not been solved. It is quite true that the highest levels of linguistic description depend on the results obtained at the lower levels. However, in a certain, quite reasonable sense, the opposite is also true. We saw above, for example, that it would be absurd or even hopeless to establish principles for the construction of sentences in terms of phonemes or morphemes, but only the development of such higher levels as the level of the actual constituents shows us that there is no point in making this futile attempt at lower levels 37 . Similarly, we have argued that the description of sentence structure through analysis of its immediate constituents loses its validity beyond certain limits. However, only the development of an even more abstract level of transformation can pave the way for the development of a simpler and more adequate analysis technique for the immediate components within narrower boundaries.
87 See N.Chomsky,M. Halle, F. LukOf f, On accent and juncture in English (“For Roman Jakobson”, “s-Gravenhage,1956, p.65-80), where phenomena are considered at all higher levels (including morphology, direct components and transformations) associated with the choice of one or another phonemic analysis.
The grammar of a language is a complex system with numerous and varied connections between its parts. To fully develop one part, it is often useful or even necessary to have some picture of the system as a whole. So, I think that the view that syntactic theory should expect to solve problems of phonology and morphology is completely untenable and does not depend on whether we are concerned with the problem of discovery procedures or not. However, I am sure that this opinion is fueled by a false analogy between the order of development of linguistic theory and the supposed order of operations in the discovery of grammatical structure.
Verbal language has become an important human invention. Thanks to him, the intelligence inherent in animals turned into reason and ensured the formation and development of culture. Although a person does a lot, he does not realize and understand everything. All people are native speakers and practitioners of language, but the vast majority do not have a theory of language. Everyone speaks in prose, but like Moliere’s Jourdain, they don’t give an account of it. This is precisely what linguistics does as a complex of scientific disciplines that study language.
3.1. Union of worldview and linguistics: teachings about language. Grammar is considered the oldest Panini (IV century BC). The illiterate and brilliant Hindu gave a fairly complete description of Sanskrit orally. Later, centuries later, it was written down and subject to numerous commentaries.
In Ancient China, hieroglyphs eliminated grammar. Already in the 5th century. BC. here interpretations of complex hieroglyphs from ancient texts appeared. They formulated the problem of the relationship of language to reality. In the 3rd century. BC. The doctrine of correcting names arose, based on the idea of \u200b\u200bconformity/inconsistency of the hieroglyph (name) with the characteristics of the individual. Choosing the right name ensures a happy life; a mistake leads to conflicts. Xiu Shen (1st century) identified the component parts of the hieroglyph in the form of graphics and phonetics (sound tones), laying down an idea of the structure of the root syllable. By the 11th century. phonetic tables were compiled, and by the 18th century. a dictionary of 47,035 hieroglyphs and 2 thousand variants emerged.
In Ancient Greece, linguistics developed in the bosom of philosophy. The school of sophists posed the question: “What does language correspond to: natural things or social institutions?” One can also highlight Aristotle's first classification of parts of speech and his definition of noun and verb. The Stoic school developed this by introducing the concept of case. Subsequently, the basic concepts of grammar were formed in the Alexandrian school (II century BC - III century). Ancient Roman scholars were busy adapting Greek schemes to Latin. As a result, the grammar of Donatus and Priscian (IV century) was formed.
In medieval Europe, the common language of culture was Latin. The school of milliners (XIII-XIV centuries) constructed a speculative scheme where Latin grammar found itself between the outside world and thinking. Since the former received depth in the course of creation, language must not only describe, but also explain. The modists not only theorized, they began to create syntax terminology, which was completed by the Frenchman P. de la Rame (1515 - 1572). He also owns the modern system of sentence members (subject - predicate - object).
Port-Royal Grammar. It has become one of the linguistic pinnacles. Its authors are French Antoine Arnault (1612 - 1694) And Claude Lanslot (1615 - 1695)– very sensitively perceived the promising plans of their predecessors and creatively developed them, relying on the strength of a circle of like-minded people. The authors sought educational goals, but they were carried away by scientific research, which culminated in the creation of an explanatory theory. They proceeded from the rationalism of the modists and R. Descartes. Language is a universal means of analyzing thinking, because its operations are expressed by grammatical structures. As basic parts of grammar, words are sounds and at the same time express thoughts. The latter are differentiated into representation, judgment and inference. In turn, the representation breaks down into names, pronouns and articles; judgment - on verbs, verbal parts, conjunctions and interjections. As for inferences, their system forms a coherent text (speech). Arno and Anslo traced the relationship between two fundamental levels - logic and grammar. If the first is represented by a categorical system, then the second is divided into general science and particular art. Logic gives deep meaning to grammar, and it acts as a superficial (lexical, syntactic, etc.) structure of thought. The life of language is built on this complementarity.
Hypotheses of the origin of language. In the 18th century The topic of the historical development of the language was updated. Philosophers and scientists were clearly not satisfied with the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. How did people learn to speak? Thinkers have put forward a variety of versions of the emergence of language: from onomatopoeia, from involuntary shouts, from a “collective agreement” (J.-J. Rousseau). The most coherent project was proposed by the French philosopher E. Condillac (1714 - 1780). He believed that the initial signs were gestural signs, which at first were only supplemented by sounds. Then sound signs came to the fore and developed from spontaneous cries to controlled articulations. At a later stage, sound speech received a written recording.
3.2. The formation of scientific linguistics. Many of the ideas of the philosophers were very interesting, permeated with the spirit of historicism, but they were united by one drawback - speculative speculation, ignoring the study of facts. The discovery of Sanskrit by Europeans helped overcome it (W. Jones, 1786). This gave rise to the stage of comparative comparison of European languages with the ancient language of India. The similarity of Sanskrit with Greek and other languages of Europe was obvious and Jones put forward a hypothesis about it as a proto-language. Only in the middle of the 19th century. it was refuted.
Comparative historical linguistics. Germany and Denmark became the center of comparative studies, because here at the turn of the 8th and 19th centuries. scientific centers emerged. In 1816, a German linguist Franz Bopp (1791 - 1867) published a book in which he clearly formulated the principles of the comparative historical method and applied them in the analysis of a number of Indo-European languages. He suggested comparing not whole words, but their component parts: roots and endings. The emphasis on morphology rather than vocabulary has proven promising. Dane Rasmus Rask (1787 - 1832) developed the principle of regularity of correspondences and differentiated classes of vocabulary. Words related to science, education and trade are most often borrowed and are not suitable for comparison. But kinship names, pronouns, and numerals are rooted and meet the goals of comparative studies. The distinction between basic and non-basic vocabulary proved to be a valuable finding.
Another important topic was the historical development of individual languages and their groups. So, in the "German Grammar" Jacob Grimm (1785-1863) the history of the Germanic languages was described, starting with very ancient forms. Alexander Khristoforovich Vostokov (1781-1864) examined Old Church Slavonic writing and revealed the secret of two special letters (nasal vowels), the sound meaning of which had been forgotten.
Each language develops as a whole, expressing the spirit of the people. A German researcher has become a classic of world linguistics Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767 - 1835). He was interested in the nature of human language as such, and his research merged with philosophical reflection. The scientist proposed a scheme of three stages of development related to any language. In the first period, language appears in all its naivety, but not in parts, but all at once as a single and autonomous whole. At the second stage, the structure of the language is improved and this process, like the first, is inaccessible to direct study. At the third stage, a “state of stability” is achieved, after which fundamental changes in the language are impossible. All linguists find languages in this state, which is different for each ethnic form.
Language is far from the deliberate actions of individuals; it represents a spontaneous and independent force of peoples. Their national spirit lives in language as a continuous collective activity that dominates all its verbal products. The linguistic element determines people’s cognitive attitude to the world and forms types of thinking. At all levels - sounds, grammar, vocabulary - linguistic forms give matter an ordered structure. Such creativity flows continuously, through all generations of people.
Thus, Humboldt gave linguistics a new ideological dynamic and anticipated a number of promising directions.
Neogrammarists: the history of language takes place in the individual psyche. In the middle of the 19th century. The influence of French positivism reached German science. The strategy of examining facts and banishing philosophy made sweeping generalizations in the style of Humboldt unfashionable. In this vein, the school of neogrammarians was formed. Its head was Hermann Paul (1846 - 1921). His main book, “Principles of the History of Language” (1880), states the leading ideas: rejection of too general questions, empiricism and inductivism, individual psychologism and historicism. There is a clear exaggeration of the individual here: as many individuals as there are separate languages. As a consequence of this, there is a bias towards psychologism; all sounds and writing exist in the minds of people (in “psychic organisms”). Along with the usual comparative historical methods, Paul highlighted introspection, without which it is difficult to fix sound laws. German neogrammarians influenced linguists in other countries. In Russia they were Philip Fedorovich Fortunatov (1848 - 1914), trained in Germany, and Alexey Alexandrovich Shakhmatov (1864 - 1920).
Fundamentals of the Russian linguistic school. It is worth highlighting two Russian-Polish scientists - Nikolai Vladislavovich Krushevsky (1851 - 1887) And Ivan Alexandrovich Baudouin de Courtenay (1845 - 1929), beyond the scope of neogrammatism. The first stated the limitations of historicism, which goes back to antiquity, it is necessary to study modern languages, there is an abundance of genuine facts. Comparison cannot be the main method of linguistics; it is more important to study language as a system of signs (a quarter of a century before F. de Saussure).
Synchrony of language: phoneme and morpheme. Baudouin de Courtenay was in solidarity with his Kazan colleague. Linguistics does not require historicism, but consistent synchronism; psychology needs the help of sociology; only then will the individual be complemented by the social. The scientist criticized word-centrism and introduced new concepts of phoneme and morpheme. A phoneme was understood as an objectively existing, stable mental unit obtained from the pronunciation of the same sound. This distinction between sound and phoneme turned out to be very promising. The morpheme acquired the same property as any independent part of the word - the root and all kinds of affixes. The scientist’s main achievement was synchronous linguistics with the concepts of phoneme and morpheme.
3.3. Structuralism as the basis of classical linguistics. A change in linguistic paradigms was carried out by a Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857 - 1913). From student notes of his lectures, colleagues S. Bally and A. Seche prepared and published “A Course in General Linguistics” (1916), which brought the scientist posthumous fame.
Language is a social system of abstract signs manifested in speech. F. de Saussure proposed new principles that distinguish between language and speech. If speech is the internal property of individuals, then language exists outside of them, forming an objective social reality. The scientist distanced himself from Humboldt's opinion, saying that language is not an activity, it is a historically established structure. It is represented by a system of special signs expressing concepts. These signs are related to all other signs: identification marks, military signals, symbolic rituals, etc., which will form the subject of a future science - “semiology” (semiotics). The linguistic sign is dual and consists of a signified (rational meaning) and a signifier (sensory impression). They complement each other like two sides of a coin.
Opposition between synchrony and diachrony. The scientist developed a diagram of two axes: the axis of simultaneity (synchrony), where phenomena coexisting in time are located, and the axis of sequence (diachrony), where everything occurs through a series of historical changes. This gives rise to two different linguistic directions. Although pre-Saussurean linguistics took into account the opposition synchrony/diachrony, it did so inconsistently and confusingly. The Swiss researcher raised opposition to a strict principle.
Significance as a functional relationship of one sign to others. Traditional linguistics proceeded from isolated linguistic units: sentences, words, roots and sounds. F. de Saussure proposed a different approach, centered on the concept of “significance”. The point is that any element of language acquires meaning in abstract functional relationships with other elements. Only in the system of some symbolic whole can its part make sense. Let's take the game of chess. The knight is an element of this game and it is significant insofar as it has a set of rules and prohibitions that determine its moves in relation to other pieces. It's the same in language. Signifiers may have very different sensory contents, but signifieds express pure roles in relation to other signifieds. A linguistic unit outside the network of abstract relations is meaningless. The pattern of significance is the signifier/signified relationship.
So, F. de Saussure's contribution to linguistics is great. If we limit ourselves to a holistic perspective, then it can be called the foundations of structuralism. “A system of abstract signs”, “significance as a functional relationship of sign elements” became the ideological core of the new approach.
Glossematics or Copenhagen (formal) structuralism. The head of this direction is a Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev (1899 - 1965). He developed the ideas of F. de Saussure and brought them to their logical conclusion. In this he was helped by the principles of neopositivism, where the formal rules of theory construction were placed at the center of the study. Jelmslev set the goal of constructing the most general theory of language based on the requirements of mathematical logic. By and large, there are three of them: consistency, completeness and simplicity. They make it possible to construct linguistics independently of linguistic and speech specifics in the form of a special calculus. And yet such a theory is “empirical”, because it does not involve a priori provisions of an extra-linguistic nature. Hjelmslev replaced “signifier” with the term “plane of expression”, and “signified” with “plane of content”. If for Saussure the units of language were signs and only them, then he developed “non-sign figures” - phonemes, roots and affixes. If for the first the opposition “signifier/signified” had a relationship to reality, then for Hjelmslev it disappeared. Consistent formalization eliminated phonetics and semantics, reducing glossematics to an algebraic game, very far from the real life of the language.
Functional structuralism of the Prague Linguistic Circle. The school was organized by a Czech researcher Vilém Mathesius (1882 - 1945), Russian emigrants became carriers of ideas Nikolai Sergeevich Trubetskoy (1890 - 1938) and Roman Osipovich Yakobson (1896 - 1982). Here the ideas of F. de Saussure and I. A. Baudouin de Courtenay intersected, giving new shoots. All members of the circle recognized that the main advantage of the latter was the introduction of the concept of function into linguistics, and Saussure's contribution was expressed in the concept of linguistic structure. They intended to develop these two approaches. In the book “Fundamentals of Phonology” Trubetskoy clearly distinguished between phonetics and phonology. If the first studies the sound side of speech, then the second studies all possible combinations of distinctive elements and the rules of their relationships. In phonology, instead of a psychological one, a functional criterion was put forward: the participation or non-participation of certain features in the discrimination of meaning. The basic unit of phonology was recognized as the phoneme, which functions through sound opposition. This aspect became Trubetskoy’s most important contribution.
So, until the 17th century. The development of linguistics was very slow. In modern times there was an acceleration and, starting from the turn of the 18th – 19th centuries, the change and improvement of theoretical hypotheses took on a rapid and continuous character. Many national schools emerged, and F. de Saussure, I. A. Baudouin de Courtenay, N. S. Trubetskoy and a number of other scientists became the pinnacles of classical linguistics.
(LSLT, 1955-56)
In the emergence of transformational-generative grammar book Chomsky (1975) Logical structure of linguistic theory(LSLT), at 570 pages, takes an unusual position. On the one hand, this is a fundamental work that underlies the entire theory, but on the other hand, it was not published until 1975. Chronologically, its main chapters preceded the important Chomsky reports of 1956 and Syntactic structures(1957a). In some respects, LSLT is still within the tradition of North American structuralism, especially with regard to the discussion of discovery methods and substitution procedures in Chapter V. From the point of view of corpus linguists, the following programmatic statement in the footnote is quite interesting:
(2) “Our whole discussion is based on the assumption that the data have been collected—that the grammar is based on an adequate corpus. We haven't discussed the most important question: How the corpus is compiled and how the linguist obtains information about linguistic behavior. See Lounsbury, “Field methods and techniques in linguistics”; Harris and Voegelin, “Eliciting” »
(Chomsky 1975, 227; emphasis in original).
At this stage of transformational-generative theory, Chomsky does seem to regard the availability of adequate representative text corpora as a self-evident starting point for linguistic description, along with inferred information about “linguistic behavior.” As evidenced by references to Lounsbury (1953) and Harris and Voegelin (1953), Chomsky had in mind a structuralist field corpus methodology based on informant verification. Of course, this methodology was largely developed for the study of “exotic” languages previously unknown to the field linguist, and therefore had no direct bearing on grammatical work with well-known languages that have a long written tradition and established traditions of grammatical description.
It is striking that Chomsky only mentions this suggestion in a footnote on page 227, after he has already made dozens of references in passing to the importance of corpora. Here are some examples: “given a corpus of linguistic material,” the various proposed grammars can be compared and the best one selected (p. 61); “given a corpus,” a set of compatible descriptive levels can be constructed (p. 68); in grammatical description, "we have<…>only a finite corpus of utterances from an infinite set of grammatically correct utterances” (p. 78); “[w]e proposed that a grammar is tested by demonstrating that it follows from the application of the corpus to a properly formulated general theory” (p. 86); “[a grammar] must produce a set of grammatically correct sentences from a limited corpus” (p. 94); “having a corpus of utterances for which we know in advance there is a grammar” (p. 166); “given a corpus of sentences,” the linguist must determine which of these utterances are phonemically distinct (p. 129); “a set of grammatically correct sentences cannot be identified with a corpus of observed sentences produced by a linguist” (p. 129); "we must project the class of observable sentences onto<…>an infinite class of grammatically correct sentences” (p. 133); "Let's pretend that<…> look at the cross-eyed man occurs in the corpus” (p. 133); "We have been given a body K, which we take to be a set of strings of words” (p. 134); "We define distribution words as the set of contexts in the corpus in which it occurs” (p. 137); "Suppose<…>that all sentences in the corpus are the same length” (p. 140); “in actual linguistic material, selection restrictions on distribution are extremely strict” (p. 141); “Given a corpus of sentences, we define a set G as a set of sentences that meet the rules established to describe this corpus<…>"(p. 147); “The method described in § 35 cannot provide a complete answer to the question of projecting a corpus onto a set of grammatically correct statements<…>"(p. 153); "Having improved the level P abstractly, we can now try to determine its effectiveness by applying it to the description of real linguistic material” (p. 223); “Given a set of first-order grammatical categories and a linguistic corpus, we have a set of generated sentences” (p. 227).
Thus, there is no doubt that in LSLT Chomsky took structuralist corpus-building methodology for granted, as an obvious constituent component in the toolkit of the emerging generative linguistics. However, it is also a fact that here, as in his later works, he himself never applies this methodology and does not pose the question of whether a transformational-generative approach to linguistics would actually need a clear new corpus methodology. Rather, without any principled discussion in LSLT, Chomsky introduces a new method of using (more or less) grammatically incorrect (or otherwise strange) made-up examples, created by himself based on his grammatical intuition as a native speaker, for use as evidence in his argument regarding grammatical correctness. Here is a list of examples of this type as presented in the LSLT (in 1955-56 the tradition of using asterisks or question marks to mark ungrammatical or odd examples did not yet exist; the first to use asterisks to indicate grammatical irregularities, to my knowledge, was R.B. Lees (1957, 402), who, in discussing the creation of compound words in English, gave examples such as a book for cooking vs. * a cooking book):
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
Furiously sleep ideas green colorless.
Sincerity admires John.
Golf admires John.
The admires John.
Of had lunch with Tom.
Look at the cross-eyed from.
The sincerity scratched by John was<...>
The table manifested by John was<...>
Himself was seen in the mirror by John.
Misery loves company.
victory's toothache
Victory has a toothache.
a talkative harvest
the considered a fool person
It seems John's.
It seems barking.
He seems forgiven.
John was tired and applauded.
At the clown, everyone laughed.
The office was worked at by John.
Despite many programmatic references to the importance of corpora, they are not used in LSLT even in the form of occasional genuine examples. However, it is also impossible to find a clearly articulated break with the structuralist corpus methodology. Note, by the way, Newmeyer's (1986, 66) claim that Chomsky's earliest books and talks are filled with polemics against the empiricist notions of science espoused by structural linguists. I couldn't find anything similar in Chomsky's writings before 1956.
On the other hand, LSLT also contains many references to the concept of linguistic intuition. At the beginning of the summary chapter, Chomsky (ibid., 61-62) states that his theory "will throw light on such facts" as (i) the ability of a speaker to produce an indefinite number of new utterances which are immediately accepted by other members of the linguistic community, and (ii) the ability to have "intuitive judgments about linguistic form", in particular, to identify the membership of phonemes in sounds, to perceive morphological relatedness (as in see : sight), identify related sentences (such as declarative sentences and their corresponding questions), identify sentence patterns (such as various examples of transitive subordinate clauses), and perceive structural ambiguities (e.g. They don't know how good meat tastes.).
Language grammar L attempts to consider these problems in terms of the formal properties of statements. A theory that defines grammatical correctness produces only grammatically correct sentences when "applied to a final pattern of linguistic behavior" and demonstrates that they are in harmony with the native speaker's intuitive judgments, corresponds to the native speaker's intuitive sense of grammatical correctness, and is a "rational assessment of it." behavior, i.e. the theory of linguistic intuition of the speaker" (ibid., 95). At first glance, these statements provide the missing link between corpus data and intuition as the raw material or raw material for generative description, but we are still faced with the fact that corpora are not used in actual practice.
The structure of a language is the internal order, the organization of parts of a language into one whole. There are: The external structure of a language (spatial, temporal and social variation of a language, determined by the structure of society, its functioning and history); The internal structure of the language, consisting of different tiers (levels) of the language: audio, lexical-semantic, grammatical; A sign of a language system, a set of relationships between elements of the system.
Few people these days would deny that the relationship between a certain word and a certain meaning is purely conditional. The long debate between “naturalists” and “conventionalists” can be considered over (cf. § 1.2.2). But the very method of proving the conventionality of the connection between “form” and “meaning” (between expression And content), namely the listing of completely different words from different languages that refer to the same thing or have the same meaning (for example, tree "tree" in English, Baum "tree" in German, arbre "tree" in French), may support the view that the vocabulary of any language is, in essence, a list of names associated by agreement with objects or meanings existing independently of it.
However, when learning a foreign language, we soon discover that one language distinguishes meanings that are not distinguished in another, and that learning the vocabulary of another language is not simply a matter of learning a new set of labels attached to already known meanings. So, for example, the English word brother-in-law can be translated into Russian as “son-in-law”, “brother-in-law”, “brother-in-law” or “brother-in-law”; and one of these four Russian words, namely the word son-in-law, should sometimes be translated as son-in-law. From this it cannot be concluded, however, that the word son-in-law has two meanings and that in one of its meanings it is equivalent to the other three. All four words in Russian have different meanings. It turns out that the Russian language unites (under the word "son-in-law") both the sister's husband and the daughter's husband, but distinguishes between the wife's brother ("brother-in-law"), the wife's sister's husband ("brother-in-law") and the husband's brother ("brother-in-law"). Therefore, in Russian there is really no word for "brother-in-law", just as in English there is no word for "son-in-law".
Each language has its own semantic structure. We will say that there are two languages semantically isomorphic(that is, they have the same semantic structure) to the extent that the meanings of one language can be put into one-to-one correspondence with the meanings of another. The degree of semantic isomorphism varies between different languages. In general (we will consider this issue and explain it more fully with examples in the chapter on semantics; see § 9.4.6) the structure of the vocabulary of a particular language reflects the differences and similarities between objects and concepts that are essential to the culture of the society in which this language operates. Consequently, the degree of semantic isomorphism between any two languages depends largely on the degree of cultural similarity between the two societies using those languages. Whether there are or can be two languages whose vocabularies are in no way isomorphic to one another is a question that we do not need to concern ourselves with. We will consider it at least possible that all the meanings identified in a language are unique to that language and are not relevant to others.
2.2.2. SUBSTANCE AND FORM
F. de Saussure and his followers explained the differences in the semantic structure of individual languages in terms of the distinction between substance And shape. Under shape vocabulary (or the form of the content plan, cf. § 2.1.4) implies an abstract structure of relations that a separate language seems to impose on the same underlying substance. Just as objects of different shapes and sizes can be sculpted from the same lump of clay, substance(or basis) within which differences and equivalences of meaning are established may be organized into different forms in different languages. F. de Saussure himself imagined the substance of meaning (the substance of the content plan) as an undivided mass of thoughts and emotions common to all people, regardless of the language they speak - as a kind of amorphous and undifferentiated conceptual basis, from which in individual In languages, by virtue of the conditional combination of a certain set of sounds with a certain part of the conceptual basis, meanings are formed. (The reader should note that in this section the terms “form” and “substance” are used in the sense in which they were introduced into linguistics and used by Saussure; see § 4.1.5.)
2.2.3. SEMANTIC STRUCTURE USING THE EXAMPLE OF COLOR SYMBOLS
There is much in Saussure's ideas about semantic structure that can be attributed to outdated psychological theories and rejected. The notion of a conceptual substance independent of language and culture is generally of dubious value. In fact, many philosophers, linguists and psychologists of our time are reluctant to admit that meanings can be satisfactorily described as ideas or concepts existing in the minds of people. The concept of substance, however, can be illustrated without making assumptions about the existence of a conceptual framework. It is an established fact that color designations in individual languages cannot always be put into one-to-one correspondence with each other; for example, the English word brown has no equivalent in French (it is translated as brun, marron or even jaune, depending on the specific shade, as well as the type of noun it defines); the Hindi word pila translates into English as yellow, orange, or even brown (although Hindi has different words for other shades of brown); there is no equivalent for blue in Russian: the words "goluboy" and "sinii" (usually translated as "light blue" and "dark blue" respectively) refer in Russian to different colors, not to different shades of the same color, as their English translations would suggest. To consider the issue as generally as possible, let us compare a fragment of the vocabulary of the English language with a fragment of the vocabulary of three hypothetical languages - A, B and C. For simplicity, we will limit our attention to the zone of the spectrum covered by five designations: red, orange, yellow, green, blue .
Rice. 1.
Let us assume that the same zone is covered by five words in A: a, b, c, d and e, five words in B: f, g, h, i and j and four words in C: p, q, r and s (see Fig. 1). It is clear from the diagram that Language A is semantically isomorphic to English (in this part of the vocabulary): it has the same number of color terms, and the boundaries between the spectrum zones covered by each of them coincide with the boundaries of English words. But neither B nor C is isomorphic with English. Thus, B contains the same number of color terms as English, but the boundaries are in different places on the spectrum, while C contains a different number of terms (and the boundaries are in different places). To appreciate the practical implications of this, imagine that we have ten objects (numbered 1 to 10 in Figure 1), each reflecting light rays of different wavelengths, and that we want to group them by color. In English, item 1 would be characterized as "red" and item 2 as "orange"; therefore they would differ in color; in language A they would also differ in color, since they would be described as a and b respectively. But in languages B and C they would have the same color designation - f or p.
On the other hand, items 2 and 3 would be distinct in B (like f and g) but combined in English in both A and C (like "orange", b and p). It is clear from the diagram that there are many cases of inequivalence of this kind. Of course, we are not saying that speakers of Language B see no difference in color between items 1 and 2. They are probably able to distinguish between them in much the same way that speakers of English can distinguish between items 2 and 3 by labeling them, say, reddish-orange "red-orange" and yellow-orange "yellow-orange". The point is that here we are dealing with a different primary classification, and the secondary classification is based on the primary one and presupposes its existence (within the English semantic structure, for example, crimson “raspberry” and scarlet “scarlet” denote “shades” of the same the colors are red, whereas Russian words blue And blue, as we have seen, refer to different colors of the primary classification). The substance of the color vocabulary can therefore be thought of as a physical continuum within which languages can make the same or different distinctions, taking place in the same or different places.
It would be unreasonable to assert that there are no sensorily perceived discrete objects and properties of the world external to language and independent of it; that everything is in an amorphous state until it is given shape by language. At the same time, it is clear that the way different things, such as flora and fauna, are grouped together within individual words can vary from language to language: the Latin word mus refers to both mouse and rat (as well as some other rodents); the French word singe denotes both apes and other monkeys, etc. To bring facts of this kind into the realm of Saussure's explanation of semantic structure requires a more abstract concept of substance. It is obviously impossible to describe the vocabulary of kinship terms in terms of the imposition of form on an underlying physical substance. Only a limited number of words can be described based on the relationships between related phenomena within the physical continuum. And we will see below that even the vocabulary of the names of color terms (which is often cited as one of the clearest examples of what is meant by the imposition of form on the substance of the plane of content) is more complex than is usually supposed (see § 9.4.5) . Additional complications, however, do not affect the essence of the issues we touched upon in this section. It is enough that at least for some fragments of the vocabulary one can assume the existence of an original substance of content.
However, the concept of semantic structure does not depend on this assumption. As the most general statement regarding semantic structure - a statement that applies to all words, regardless of whether they relate to objects and properties of the physical world or not - we can accept the following formulation: the semantic structure of any system of words in the dictionary is a network of semantic relations, present between the words of this system. We will defer consideration of the nature of these relations to the chapter on semantics. For now, it is important to note that this definition uses as key terms system And attitude. Color terms (like kinship terms and many other classes of words in various languages) represent an ordered system of words that stand in certain relationships with each other. Such systems are isomorphic if they contain the same number of units and if these units are in the same relationships with each other.
2.2.4. “LANGUAGE IS FORM, NOT SUBSTANCE”
Before discussing the opposition of substance and form on the plane of expression (where it is in fact more general), it is useful to return to the analogy of the chess game proposed by F. de Saussure. First of all, it can be noted that the material from which the chess pieces are made is not relevant to the playing process. Chess can be made from any material at all (wood, ivory, plastic, etc.), as long as the physical nature of the material is capable of maintaining significant differences between the outlines of the pieces in a normal chess game. (This last point - the physical stability of the material - is obviously important; F. de Saussure did not emphasize this, but took it for granted. Chess pieces carved, for example, from ice, would not be suitable if the game was played in a warm room. ) Not only the material from which the figures are made is irrelevant, but also the details of their outlines. It is only necessary that each of them be recognized as a piece that moves in a certain way according to the rules of the game. If we lose or break one of the pieces, we can replace it with some other object (a coin or a piece of chalk, for example) and make an agreement that we will treat the new object in the game as the piece it replaces. The relationship between the outline of a piece and its function in the game is a matter of arbitrary convention. Provided that these agreements are accepted by the partners, you can play with equal success with pieces of any shape. If we draw conclusions from this analogy regarding the plane of expression of language, then we will come closer to understanding one of the basic principles of modern linguistics: in the words of Saussure, language is form, not substance.
2.2.5. "REALIZATION" IN SUBSTANCE
As we saw in the previous chapter, speaking precedes writing (see § 1.4.2). In other words, the primary substance of the linguistic plane of expression is sounds (namely, the range of sounds produced by the human speech organs); writing is, in essence, a way of transferring words and sentences of a certain language from the substance in which they normally are being implemented, into the secondary substance of marks (visible icons on paper or stone, etc.). Further transfer is possible - from a secondary to a tertiary substance, as, for example, when transmitting messages by telegraph. The very possibility of such a transfer (it could be called “transsubstantiation”) indicates that the structure of the linguistic plane of expression turns out to be to a very large extent independent of the substance in which it is realized.
For simplicity, we will first consider languages that use an alphabetic writing system. Let us assume that the sounds of a language are in one-to-one correspondence with the letters of the alphabet used to represent them (in other words, that each sound is represented by a special letter and each letter always stands for the same sound). If this condition is met, there will be no homography or homophony - there will be a one-to-one correspondence between the words of the written language and the words of the spoken language, and (based on the simplified assumption that sentences consist only of words) all sentences of written and spoken language will also be in one-to-one correspondence. Therefore, written and spoken languages will be isomorphic. (The fact that, as we have already seen, written and spoken languages are never completely isomorphic does not matter here. To the extent that they are not isomorphic, they are different languages. This is one of the consequences of the principle that language is form, not substance.)
To prevent confusion, we will use square brackets to distinguish sounds from letters (this is a standard convention; cf. § 3.1.3). So, [t], [e], etc. will represent sounds, a t, e, etc. will represent letters. Now we can introduce the difference between formal units and them substantial realization through sounds and letters. When we say that [t] is in accordance with t, [e] is in accordance with e, and in general, when we say that a certain sound is in accordance with a certain letter and vice versa, we can interpret this statement in the sense that neither sounds nor letters are primary, but both are alternative realizations of the same formal units, which are themselves completely abstract elements, independent of the substance in which they are being implemented. For the purposes of this section, we will call these formal units “elements of expression.” By using numbers to denote them (and enclosing them in diagonal brackets), we can say that /1/ denotes a specific element of the expression that can be realized in sound substance sound [t] and in graphic substance letter t; that /2/ denotes another element of the expression, which can be realized as [e] and e, and so on.
It is now clear that just as chess pieces can be made of different types of material, the same set of elements of expression can be realized not only by means of sounds and marks, but also in many other types of substance. For example, each element could be realized by light of a particular color, by certain gestures, by a certain smell, by a larger or smaller handshake, etc. It is even possible, obviously, to build a communication system in which different elements would be realized by different types of substance - a system in which, for example, element /1/ would be realized by sound (of any kind), /2/ by light (of any color), /3/ by a hand gesture, etc. However, we will not take this possibility into account and would rather focus its attention to the ways of realizing the elements of expression through differences in some homogeneous substance. This is more typical of human language. Although oral speech may be accompanied by various conventional gestures and one or another facial expression, these gestures and facial expressions do not realize formal units of the same level as the units realized by the sounds that are part of the words accompanying the gestures; in other words, a certain gesture, when combined with sounds, does not form a word, as is the case when two or more sounds are combined to form a word.
In principle, the elements of language expression can be realized in a substance of any kind, provided that the following conditions are satisfied: (a) the sender of the “message” must have at his disposal the necessary apparatus in order to produce significant differences in the substance (differences in sounds, shapes, etc.) ...), and the recipient of the message must have the apparatus necessary to perceive these differences; in other words, the sender (speaker, writer, etc.) must have the necessary "encoding" apparatus, and the receiver (listening, reading, etc.) must have the corresponding "decoding" apparatus; (b) the substance itself, as the medium in which these differences are established, must be sufficiently stable to maintain the differences in the implementation of the elements of expression during the time that, under normal communication conditions, is necessary for the transmission of messages from the sender to the recipient.
2.2.6. THE SUBSTANCE OF ORAL AND WRITTEN LANGUAGE
Neither of these conditions requires detailed comment. Nevertheless, a brief comparison of speech and writing (more precisely, sound and graphic substance) may be useful from the point of view of ascertaining: (a) their accessibility and convenience, and (b) their physical stability or durability.
In their reflections on the origin of language, many linguists have come to the conclusion that sounds are the most suitable material for the development of language compared to all other possible means. Unlike gestures or any other substance within which differences are perceived by means of sight (a very developed sense in human beings), a sound wave does not depend on the presence of a source of light, and it is usually not interfered with by objects lying in the path of its propagation: it is equally Suitable for communication both day and night. Unlike different kinds of substance, within which the necessary distinctions are made and perceived by touch, sound substance does not require the sender and receiver to be in close proximity; it leaves your hands free for other activities. Whatever other factors may influence the development of human speech, it is clear that the sound substance (that range of sounds that corresponds to the normal pronunciation and hearing capabilities of a person) satisfies the conditions of accessibility and convenience quite well. Only a relatively small number of people are physically unable to produce or perceive differences in sounds. If we keep in mind those forms of communication that, as one can assume, were the most natural and necessary in primitive societies, then we can consider the sound substance to be quite satisfactory in terms of the physical stability of the signals.
Graphic substance differs to some extent from sound substance in terms of convenience and accessibility: it requires the use of one or another tool and does not leave the hands free to perform any actions related to communication.
Much more important, however, is that they differ from each other in durability. Until relatively recently (before the invention of the telephone and sound recording equipment), the substance of sound could not be used as a completely reliable means of communication unless the sender and receiver were present in the same place at the same time. (The bearers of oral traditions and the messengers who were contacted to convey this or that message had to rely on memory.) The sounds themselves seemed to fade and, if they were not immediately “decoded,” were lost forever. But with the invention of writing, another, more durable means was found to “encode” language. Although writing was less convenient (and therefore uncommon) for shorter-term communication, it made it possible to transmit messages over long distances, as well as to store them for the future. The differences in terms of most typical use that have existed and still exist between speech and writing (speech being immediate personal communication; writing being more carefully constructed texts intended to be read and understood without the aid of "clues" provided by the immediate situation) are many. are given both to explain the origin of writing and to explain many subsequent discrepancies between written and spoken language. As we have already seen, these differences are such that it would be inaccurate to say that for languages with a long tradition of writing, writing is only transfer of speech to another substance (see § 1.4.2). Despite all the differences in the physical stability of sound and graphic substances, undoubtedly significant in the historical development of written and spoken language, it is indisputable that both types of substance are sufficiently stable to maintain the perceptual differences between sounds or marks that implement elements of expression, under the conditions in which they are usually used speaking and writing.
2.2.7. ARBITRATIBILITY OF SUBSTANTIAL REALIZATION
We can now turn to Saussure's second statement regarding the substance in which language is realized: just as the outlines of chess pieces are not relevant to the process of play, so are those specific features of shapes or sounds by which the elements of expression of language are identified. In other words, the connection of a particular sound or letter with a particular element of expression is a matter of arbitrary agreement. This can be illustrated with an example from the English language. Table 3 gives in column (i) six English expression elements, randomly numbered from 1 to 6; column (ii) gives their normal orthographic representations, and column (iii) their implementation as sounds. (For simplicity, let us assume that the sounds [t], [e], etc. are further indecomposable and realize the minimal elements of language expression, as they are found, for example, in words written in the form
Table 3
Expression Elements
| (i) | (ii) | (iii) | (iv) | (v) | (vi) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| /1/ | t | [t] | p | [p] | e |
| /2/ | e | [e] | i | [i] | b |
| /3/ | b | [b] | d | [d] | d |
| /4/ | d | [d] | b | [b] | p |
| /5/ | i | [i] | e | [e] | t |
| /6/ | p | [p] | t | [t] | i |
| (vii) | (viii) | (ix) | (x) | (xi) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A | "bet" | dip | dbe | |
| B | "pet" ("pamper") | tip | ibe | |
| C | "bit" | dep | dte | |
| D | "pit" | tep | ite | |
| E | "bid" ("order") | deb | dtp | |
| F | "bed" | dib | dbp |
bet, pet, bid, etc. Although this assumption will be questioned in the next chapter, the modifications we find necessary to make will not affect our reasoning.) Let us now accept another arbitrary condition, according to which /1/ is realized orthographically as p , /2/ - like i, etc.; see column (iv). As a result, the word A (which means "bet" and was previously written bet) will now be written as dip, the word B will be written as tip, etc.; see columns (vii), (viii) and (ix). It is clear that every two words or sentences in written English that were different in the adopted orthography are also different in our new conventional orthography. The language itself remains completely unaffected by changes concerning its substantial realization.
The same applies to spoken language (but with some restrictions, which we will introduce below). Suppose that the element of the expression /1/ is realized in the sound substance as [p], /2/ - as [i], etc. - see column (v). Then the word that is now written bet (and may continue to be written bet, since, obviously, there is no internal connection between sounds and letters), will be pronounced like the word that is now written dip (although its meaning will remain the same "bet" "bet" ); and so on for all other words; see column (x). Again we find that when the substantial realization changes, the language itself does not change.
2.2.8. PRIMARY SOUND SUBSTANCE
However, there is still an important difference between the graphic and audio implementation of a language; and it is precisely this difference that forces us to modify the strict Saussurean principle, according to which the elements of expression are completely independent of the substance in which they are realized. While there is nothing in the design of the letters d, b, e, etc., which prevents us from combining them in any way that might occur to us, some combinations of sounds turn out to be unpronounceable. For example, we might decide to adopt for a written language the set of implementations listed in column (vi) of our table, so that word A is written dbe, word B ibe, etc. - see column (xi). Sequences of letters from column (xi) can be written or typed with the same ease as sequences from column (ix). On the contrary, those sound complexes that would result from replacing [b] with [d], [i] with [t] and [d] with [p] in the word “bid” (word E) would be unpronounceable. The fact that certain restrictions are placed on the pronunciation (and intelligibility) of certain groups or complexes of sounds means that the elements of expression of a language, or rather combinations of them, are determined in part by the nature of their primary substance and the "mechanisms" of speech and hearing. Within the range of possibilities limited by the requirement of pronunciation (and intelligibility), each language has its own combinatorial constraints, which can be attributed to the phonological structure of the language in question.
Since we have not yet drawn the line between phonetics and phonology (see Chapter 3), we must here be content with a somewhat imprecise presentation of this issue. We will accept without proof the division of sounds into consonants and vowels and assume that this classification is justified both in general phonetic theory and in describing the combinatorial capabilities of individual languages, including English. So, replacing [t] with [p], [i] with [e], etc. (see column (iv)) does not have a significant effect on pronunciation because (by the way) because with this replacement the sounds retain their initial consonantal or vocal character. This not only guarantees the pronunciation of the resulting words, but also does not violate their normal (as for English words) phonological structure, which is characterized by a certain ratio of consonants and vowels and a certain way of combining the sounds of these two classes. However, we must understand that other similar substitutions can be made, which, although they will satisfy the pronunciability condition, will change the ratio of consonants and vowels and the patterns of their combination in words. However, provided that all the words of spoken English remain different under the new system of implementing the elements of expression, the grammatical structure of the language will not change. It must therefore be assumed in principle that two (or more) languages can be grammatically, but not phonologically, isomorphic. Languages are phonologically isomorphic if and only if the sounds of one language are in one-to-one correspondence with the sounds of another language and the corresponding classes of sounds (for example, consonants and vowels) are subject to the same laws of compatibility. A one-to-one correspondence between sounds does not imply their identity. On the other hand, as we have seen, the laws of compatibility are not entirely independent of the physical nature of sounds.
The conclusion from the previous two paragraphs confirms the validity of those ideas according to which the general linguistic theory recognizes the priority of oral language over written language (cf. § 1.4.2). The laws of combination that govern letters in a written language are entirely inexplicable on the basis of the shapes of the letters, while they are determined, at least in part, by the physical nature of the sounds in the corresponding spoken words. For example, u and n are related to each other by design in the same way as d and p. But this fact has absolutely nothing to do with how these letters are combined with each other in written English words. Much more relevant is the fact that the letters in question are in partial correspondence with the sounds of spoken language. The study of sound substance is of much greater interest to a linguist than the study of graphic substance and writing systems.
2.2.9. COMBINATION AND CONTRAST
The only properties possessed by the elements of expression, considered in abstraction from their substantial realization, are (i) their combinatorial function- their ability to combine with each other in groups or complexes serving to identify and distinguish words and sentences (as we have just seen, the combinatorial abilities of the elements of expression are in fact partly determined by the nature of their primary, that is, sound, substance), and (ii) their contrasting function- their difference from each other. It is the second of these properties that F. de Saussure had in mind when he said that the elements of expression (and, generalizing, all linguistic units) are negative in nature: the principle contrast(or opposition) is a fundamental principle of modern linguistic theory. This can be illustrated by the material in Table. 3 on page 80. Each of the elements of the expression (numbered 1 to 6 in the table) contrasts, or is in opposition, with every other element that can occur in the same position in English words, in the sense that the replacement of one element by another (more precisely, the replacement of the substantial realization of one element by the substantial realization of another) leads to the transformation of one word into another. For example, word A (bet) differs from word B (pet) in that it begins with /3/ rather than /6/; it differs from the word C (bit) in that it has /2/ in the middle, not /5/, and it differs from the word F (bed) in that it ends in /1/, not /4 /. Based on these six words, we can say that /1/ contrasts with /4/, /2/ with /5/ and /3/ with /6/. (Taking other words for comparison, we could, of course, establish other contrasts and other elements of expression.) As a formal unit and within the class of units under consideration, /1/ can be defined as an element that does not coincide with /4/ and combines with / 2/ or /5/ and with /3/ or /6/; you can define all other elements in the table in a similar way. In general, any formal unit can be defined (i) as distinct from all other elements opposed to it, and (ii) as having certain combinatorial properties.
2.2.10. DISCRETE ELEMENTS OF EXPRESSION
Now, starting from the distinction between form and substance, some important points can be introduced. Consider, as an example, the contrast between /3/ and /6/, maintained in spoken language by the difference between the sounds [b] and [р|]. As we have seen, the fact that we are dealing with this particular sound difference and not any other is not relevant for the structure of the English language. It should also be noted that the difference between [b] and [p] is not absolute, but relative. In other words, what we call a “[b] sound” or a “[p] sound” is a series of sounds, and there is actually no specific point where the “[b] series” begins and the “[p] series” ends. (or vice versa). From a phonetic point of view, the difference between [b] and [p] is gradual. But the difference between the elements of the expression /3/ and /6/ is absolute in the following sense. The words A and B (bet and pet) and all other English words distinguished by the presence of /3/ or /6/ do not gradually transform into one another in spoken language, just as [b] is gradually transformed into [p]. There may be some point where it is impossible to distinguish between A and B being meant, but there is no word in English that is identified by a sound intermediate between [b] and [p], and accordingly occupies an intermediate position between A and B in relation to grammatical function or meaning. It follows from this that the plane of expression of a language is built from discrete units. But these discrete units are realized in physical substance by rows of sounds, within which significant fluctuations are possible. Since units of expression should not be confused with one another in their substantial implementation, there must be a certain “margin of safety” that ensures the distinctness of a series of sounds that realizes one of them from a series of sounds that realizes another. Some contrasts may be lost over time or may not be retained in all words by all native speakers. This fact can be explained, apparently, by the fact that such contrasts are beyond the lower “threshold” of importance determined by the number of statements distinguished by these contrasts. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the difference between certain elements of an expression is relative and not absolute.
2.2.11. GRAMMAR AND PHONOLOGICAL WORDS
We are now in a position to disambiguate the term "composition" as used in the previous section. It has been said that words are made up of sounds (or letters) and that sentences and phrases are made up of words (see §2.1.1). It should be obvious, however, that the term "word" is ambiguous. In fact, it is commonly used in several different meanings, but here it will suffice to highlight just two.
As formal, grammatical units, words can be considered as completely abstract entities whose only properties are contrastive and combinatorial functions (later we will consider the question of what contrast and combination mean when applied to grammatical units). But these grammatical words are realized in groups or complexes of expression elements, each of which (in oral language) is realized by a separate sound. We can call complexes of expression elements phonological words. The need for such a distinction (we will return to it below: see § 5.4.3) is obvious from the following considerations. First of all, the internal structure of a phonological word has nothing to do with the fact that it realizes a particular grammatical word. For example, the grammatical word A (which means “bet” - see Table 3, p. 81) turns out to be realized using a complex of elements of the expression /3 2 1/; but it could equally be realized by a complex of other elements of expression and not necessarily in the number of three. (Note that this is not the same as what we pointed out earlier regarding the implementation of elements of expression. A phonological word consists not of sounds, but of elements of expression.) In addition, the grammatical and phonological words of a language do not necessarily have a one-to-one correspondence . For example, the phonological word denoted in normal orthographic representation as down realizes at least two grammatical words (cf. down the hill, the soft down on his cheek), and this is - different grammatical words because they have different contrastive and combinatorial functions in sentences. An example of the opposite phenomenon is represented by alternative realizations of the same grammatical word (past tense of a certain verb), which can be written as dreamed and dreamed. It may be noted, by the way, that these two phenomena are usually interpreted as types of homonymy and synonymy (see § 1.2.3). Above, we did not address the meaning of words, but took into account only their grammatical function and phonological implementation. So, let’s summarize what was said above: grammatical words are realized by phonological words (and a one-to-one correspondence is not assumed between them), and phonological words consist of elements of expression. Obviously, the term "word" can be given a third meaning, according to which we could say that the English word cap and the French word cap are identical: they are the same in (graphic) substance. But in linguistics we are not concerned with the substantial identity of words. The connection between a grammatical word and its substantial implementation in sounds or shapes is indirect in the sense that it is established through an intermediate phonological level.
2.2.12. "ABSTRACT" OF LINGUISTIC THEORIES
It may seem that the reasoning in this section is far from practical considerations. This is wrong. It was a rather abstract approach to the study of language, based on the distinction between substance and form, that led to a deeper understanding of the historical development of languages than was possible in the 19th century, and later led to the construction of more comprehensive theories regarding the structure of human language, its acquisition and use . And such theories were applied to purely practical purposes: in developing more effective ways of teaching languages, in building better telecommunications systems, in cryptography, and in constructing systems for analyzing languages using a computer. In linguistics, as in other sciences, abstract theory and its practical application go hand in hand; however, theory precedes practical application and is evaluated independently, contributing to a deeper understanding of the subject of one's study.
2.3. PARADIGMATIC AND SYNTAGMATIC RELATIONS
2.3.1. THE CONCEPT OF DISTRIBUTION
Each linguistic unit (with the exception of the sentence; see § 5.2.1) is, to a greater or lesser extent, subject to restrictions regarding the contexts in which it can be used. This fact is reflected in the statement that each linguistic unit (below the sentence level) has a specific distribution. If two (or more) units occur in the same set of contexts, they are said to be equivalent in distribution(or have the same distribution); if they do not have common contexts, then they are in additional distribution. Between the two extremes - full equivalence and additional distribution - we should distinguish two types of partial equivalence: (a) distribution of one unit can include distribution of another (without being completely equivalent to it): if X occurs in all contexts in which it occurs at, but there are contexts in which it occurs at, but does not occur X, then distribution at includes distribution X; (b) distributions of two (or more) units may overlap(or intersect): if there are contexts in which both occur X, so at, but neither occurs in all the contexts in which the other occurs, then it is said that X And at have partially overlapping distributions. (For those readers who are familiar with some basic concepts of formal logic and mathematics, it will be clear that various types of distributive connections between linguistic units can be described within the framework of class logic and set theory. This fact is very significant when studying the logical foundations of linguistic theory. That could be called in a broad sense "mathematical" linguistics, now represents a very important part of our science... In this introductory presentation of the foundations of linguistic theory, we cannot consider in detail the various branches of "mathematical linguistics", however, as necessary, we will refer to some of the most important points of contact with it.
Rice. 2. Distributive relations ( X appears in the set of contexts A, and B is the set of contexts in which it occurs at).
It should be emphasized that the term "distribution" refers to the variety of contexts in which a linguistic unit occurs, but only to the extent that the restrictions imposed on the occurrence of the unit in question in a particular context are subject to systematization. What is meant by “systematization” here will be explained using a specific example. The elements /l/ and /r/ have, at least in part, equivalent distribution in English (for our use of slashes, see 2.2.5): both occur in a number of otherwise phonologically identical words (cf. light " light": right "right", lamb "lamb": ram "ram", blaze "flame": braise "put out", climb "climb": crime "crime", etc.). But many words that contain one element cannot be matched with otherwise phonologically identical words that contain another element: there is no word srip as a pair for slip, no word tlip as a pair for trip. , there is no word brend when there is blend "mixture", there is no word blick as a pair for brick "brick", etc. However, there is a significant difference between the absence of words such as srip and tlip, on the one hand, and such as brend and blick, on the other. The first two (and words like them) are excluded due to certain general laws that govern the phonological structure of English words: there are no words in English that begin with /tl/ or /sr/ (this statement can be formulated in more general terms, but for present purposes The rule formulated by us in the form in which we have just stated it is quite sufficient). In contrast, no systematic statement can be made about the distribution of /l/ and /r/ that would explain the absence of blick and brend. Both elements appear in other words surrounded by /b-i. . ./ and /b-e. . ./; Wed blink: brink, blessed: breast, etc. From the point of view of their phonological structure, brend and blick (but not tlip and srip) are quite acceptable words for the English language. It is pure “accident”, so to speak, that they are not given grammatical function and meaning, and are not used by the language.
What we have now illustrated with a phonological example also applies to the grammatical level. Not all word combinations are acceptable. Of the unacceptable combinations, some are explained in terms of the general distributive classification of words in the language, while the rest have to be explained by referring to the meaning of specific words or to some other individual properties of them. We will return to this issue later (see §4.2.9). For the purposes of this discussion, it is sufficient to note that equivalent distribution, complete or partial, does not presuppose absolute identity of the environments in which the units in question occur: it presupposes identity insofar as these environments are determined by the phonological and grammatical rules of the language.
2.3.2. FREE VARIATION
As we saw in the previous section, every linguistic unit has both a contrastive and a combinatorial function. It is clear that two units cannot be contrasted unless they are at least partially equivalent in distribution (for units in a relation of complementary distribution, the question of contrast does not arise). Units that occur in some given context, but do not contrast with each other, are in relation free variation. For example, the vowels of the two words leap and get contrast in most contexts in which they both occur (cf. bet: beat, etc.), but are in relation free variation in alternative pronunciations of the word economics "economy". In both phonology and semantics, one should avoid confusing free variation (equivalence of a function in a context) with equivalent distribution (occurrence in the same environments). What exactly is meant by free variation and contrast depends on the nature of the units to which the terms are applied and the point of view from which they are viewed. As we have seen, two elements of an expression are in a relation of contrast if, as a result of replacing one of them with the other, a new word or sentence is obtained; otherwise they are in a relationship of free variation. But words (and other grammatical units) can be viewed from two different points of view. Only in cases where their grammatical function is at issue (that is, roughly speaking, their belonging to nouns, verbs or adjectives, etc.) are the concepts of contrast and free variation interpreted in terms of equivalent distribution; this is explained by the presence of a direct connection between grammatical function and distribution (cf. § 4.2.6). Although there is also a certain connection between the meaning of a word and its distribution, neither of them is completely determined by the other; and therefore the two concepts are theoretically distinct. In semantics, free variation and contrast should be interpreted as “identity and difference of meanings.” (It is more customary, however, to use the traditional term “synonymy” in semantics rather than “free variation.”)
2.3.3. "PARADIGMATICS" AND "SYNTAGMATICS"
Due to the possibility of its appearance in a certain context, a linguistic unit enters into relationships of two different types. She enters paradigmatic relationships with all units that may also occur in a given context (whether they are in a relation of contrast or free variation with the unit in question), and in syntagmatic relationships with other units of the same level with which it occurs and which form its context. Let us return to the example we used in the previous section: due to the possibility of its appearance in the context /-et/, the element of the expression /b/ is in a paradigmatic relationship with /p/, /s/, etc. and in a syntagmatic relationship with /e / and /t/. In the same way, /e/ is in a paradigmatic relationship with /i/, /a/, etc. and in a syntagmatic relationship with /b/ and /t/, and /t/ is paradigmatically related to /d/, /n/ etc. and syntagmatically with /b/ and /e/.
Paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations are also relevant at the level of words and, strictly speaking, at any level of linguistic description. For example, the word pint "pint", due to the possibility of appearing in contexts such as a. . . of milk", enters into paradigmatic relationships with other words - such as bottle, cup, gallon, etc., and into syntagmatic relationships with a, of and milk . Words (and other grammatical units) actually enter into paradigmatic and syntagmatic relationships of various types. "Possibility of occurrence" can be interpreted by paying attention to whether the resulting phrase or sentence is meaningful or not; taking into account the situations in which actual utterances are made, or independently of this; taking into account the dependencies between different sentences in coherent speech, or not taking them into account, etc. Below we will have to dwell in more detail on the various restrictions that may be imposed on the interpretation of the term “possibility of occurrence” (see § 4.2.1 on the concept of “acceptability”) . Here it should be emphasized that all linguistic units enter into syntagmatic and paradigmatic relationships with units of the same level (elements of expression with elements of expression, words with words, etc.), which context a linguistic unit can be precisely defined in terms of its syntagmatic relations and that the definition of the set of contexts in which a unit may occur, as well as the scope of the class of units with which it enters into paradigmatic relations, depends on the interpretation given explicitly or implicitly to the concept of "possibility" appearance" (or "acceptability").
It may seem that this last point unnecessarily complicates the issue. It will become clear later that one of the advantages of this formulation is that it allows us to distinguish between grammatically correct and meaningful sentences, not in terms of the combination of grammatical units in the one case and semantic units ("meanings") in the other, but in terms of degree or aspect "acceptability" maintained by different combinations of the same units.
2.3.4. INTERDEPENDENCE OF PARADIGMATIC AND SYNTAGMATIC RELATIONS
Two important statements can now be made about paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations. The first of these, which (along with the distinction between substance and form) can be considered as a defining feature of modern, “structural” linguistics, is this: linguistic units have no significance outside of paradigmatic and syntagmatic relationships with other units. (This is a more specific formulation of the general “structural” principle, which states that every linguistic unit has its specific place in the system of relations: see § 1.4.6.) Here is an illustration from the level of elements of expression. In the previous discussion of such English words as bet, pet, etc., it was assumed that each of these words is realized by a sequence of three elements of expression (just as they are written by sequences of three letters in the accepted orthography). Now we can test this assumption. Suppose, contrary to the facts, that there are words realized as put, tit, cat, pup, tip, cap, puck and tick, but there are no words realized (“pronounced”) as but, pet, pit, bit, cut, gut , kit, duck, cab, cad, kid, cud, etc. In other words, we assume (with rather imprecise phonetic terms) that all phonological words represented by complexes of three sounds can be described in terms of their substantial realization ( that is, as phonetic words) as a sequence consonant + vowel + consonant (where the consonants are [p], [t] or [k], and the vowels are [u], [i] and [a] - for simplicity, let's assume that there are no other consonants or vowels), but that in the first and second position only such combinations of consonant and vowel are possible as , and . It is clear, then, that [u], [i] and [a] are not realizations of three different elements of expression, since they do not stand in a paradigmatic relation (and, a fortiori, in a contrastive relation). Exactly how many elements of expression are distinguished in such a situation (which is not something exceptional compared to what is usually found in the language) depends on some more specific phonological principles, which we will discuss below. We can assume that in each word only two positions of contrast are distinguished, of which the first is “filled” with one of three consonantal-vocal complexes, and the second with one of three consonants: then we will distinguish six elements of expression (implemented as /1/: , / 2/ : , /3/ : , /4/ : [p], /5/ : [t] and /6/: [k]). On the other hand, we can distinguish four elements of expression, of which three are realized by the consonants [р], [t] and [к], occurring in the initial and final position, and the fourth, appearing in the middle position, is realized by a vowel, the phonetic quality of which is determined by the preceding consonant. The point, therefore, is that one cannot first establish the elements and then establish their admissible combinations. Elements are defined by simultaneously taking into account their paradigmatic and syntagmatic connections. The reason that we distinguish three positions of contrast in the English words bet, pet, bit, pit, bid, tip, tap, etc., is that paradigmatic and syntagmatic connections can be made at three points. We will see that the interdependence of paradigmatic and syntagmatic measurements is a principle that applies to all levels of linguistic structure.
2.3.5. "SYNTAGMATIC" DOES NOT IMPLY "LINEAR"
The second important statement is the following: syntagmatic connections do not necessarily imply the ordering of units in a linear sequence, such that the substantial realization of one element precedes in time the substantial realization of another. Let us compare, for example, two Chinese words - ha?o ("day") and ha?o ("good"), which differ phonologically from each other in that the first is pronounced with an intonation conventionally designated as "fourth tone" (/ ?/), realized as a decrease in tone during a syllable), and the second is pronounced with a “third tone” (/?/, realized as a rise in tone during a syllable from a mid-tone to a high tone and again a decrease to a mid-tone). These two elements - /?/ and /?/ - are in a paradigmatic contrast relationship in the context of /hao/; in other words, in this context (and in many others) they enter into the same syntagmatic relations. If we say that one word is to be analyzed phonologically as /hao/+/?/ and another as /hao/+/?/, this does not naturally mean that the substantial realization of the tone follows the substantial realization of the rest of the word. Linguistic utterances are spoken over time and therefore can be segmented as a chain of successive sounds or complexes of sounds. However, whether this temporal succession is relevant for the structure of language depends again on the paradigmatic and syntagmatic connections of linguistic units and does not depend, in principle, on the successivity of their substantial realizations.
Relative sequence is one of the properties of a sound substance (in the case of a graphic substance, this feature is reflected in the spatial ordering of elements - left to right, right to left or top to bottom, depending on the adopted writing system), which may or may not be used by the language . This is best illustrated with an example related to the grammatical level. English is commonly referred to as a "fixed word order" language, while Latin is a "free word order" language. (In fact, word order in English is not completely "fixed" and word order in Latin is completely "free", but the difference between the two languages is clear enough for the purposes of this illustration.) In particular, an English sentence consisting of a subject , predicate and direct object (e.g., Brutus killed Caesar "Brutus killed Caesar"), is normally pronounced (and written) with the substantial realizations of the three units in question, ordered as a sequence subject + predicate + direct object; changing the places of two nouns, or nominal components, leads to the fact that the sentence becomes ungrammatical or turns into another sentence: Brutus killed Caesar “Brutus killed Caesar” and Caesar killed Brutus “Caesar killed Brutus” are different sentences; while The chimpanzee ate some bananas "The chimpanzee ate bananas" is a sentence, Some bananas ate the chimpanzee (one might think) is not. On the contrary, Brutus necavit Caesarem and Caesarem necavit Brutus are alternative substantial realizations of the same sentence ("Brutus killed Caesar"), just as Caesar necavit Brutum and Brutum necavit Caesar ("Caesar killed Brutus"). The relative order in which words are arranged in a Latin sentence is therefore grammatically irrelevant, although, of course, the words cannot be pronounced except in one particular order or another.
2.3.6. LINEAR AND NONLINEAR SYNTAGMATIC RELATIONS
Now let us formulate our statement in a more general form. For simplicity, let us assume that we are dealing with two classes of (roughly distinguished) units, and the members of each class are in paradigmatic relationships with each other. These are classes X with members a and b and Y with members p and q; Using the standard notation for expressing class membership, we get:
X = (a, b), Y = (p, q).
(These formulas can be read as follows: “X is the class of which a and b are members,” “Y is the class of which p and q are members.”) The substantial realization of each unit is represented by the corresponding italic letter ( A implements a, etc., a X And Y are variables denoting realizations of units). Let us assume that these substantial realizations cannot occur simultaneously (they can be consonants and vowels or words), but are linearly ordered in relation to each other. In this case there are three possibilities to consider: (i) the sequence may be "fixed" in the sense that, say, X necessarily precedes Y(that is, they meet ar, aq, bp, bq, but not pa, qa, pb, qb); (ii) the sequence may be "free", in the sense that it occurs as XY, so YX, But XY = YX(where " = " means "equivalent" - equivalence is determined for a particular level of description); (iii) a sequence may be "fixed" (or "free") in the slightly different sense that it occurs as XY, so YX, But XY ? YX("?" means "not equivalent"). Let us note in passing that these three possibilities are not always distinguished when considering such matters as word order. The interpretation of the last two of these three possibilities does not present theoretical difficulties. In case (ii), since XY And YX do not contrast, the units a, b, p and q, realized in sequences such as ar or ra, are situated in non-linear syntagmatic relation(this is the situation with words in languages with free word order). In case (iii), since XY contrasts with YX, the units are in linear syntagmatic relation(this is the situation with adjective and noun for some French adjectives). Greater difficulties are associated with the interpretation of case (i), which, by the way, is quite common. Because the YX does not occur, members of classes X and Y cannot be in a linear relationship at this level. On the other hand, in some place in the description of the language, the mandatory order of their implementation in substance should be indicated; therefore, when generalizing rules relevant to different levels, it would be advantageous to combine the examples from (iii) with the examples from (ii). Implicitly referring to this principle, we said above that English words like bet, pet, etc. have the phonological structure consonant + vowel + consonant (using the terms “consonant” and “vowel” for classes of elements of expression). That some syntagmatic relations in English are linear is clear from a comparison of words such as pat, apt, cat, act, etc. CCV sequences (consonant + consonant + vowel; we are talking about consonants realized as [p], [t], [k], [b], [d] and [g]) are impossible, however, as we have just seen, both CVC and , at least a few examples, VCC. At the same time, there are systematic restrictions on the co-occurrence of consonants in the VCC sequence; for example, a word that would be realized in a substance as or is systematically excluded, just like , [app], . In the phonological structure of the English words in question, both case (i) and case (iii) are therefore exemplified. By reducing them to the same ordering formula, we simplify the statement about their substantial realization. It should be emphasized, however, that this does not mean that we should abandon the distinction between such "accidental" gaps in the English vocabulary as or and such systematically excluded "words" as or (cf. § 2.3.1).
Further discussion of issues related to the linear organization of elements will be inappropriate here. We will return to it below. But before proceeding further, it should be emphasized that the present discussion is deliberately limited by the assumption that all units in a syntagmatic connection have an equal chance of co-occurrence and that there are no groupings within complexes of such units. It may also seem that our reasoning is based on the additionally introduced assumption that each unit is necessarily realized by one and only one distinguishable segment or feature of the sound substance. This is not the case, as we will see later. Our two general claims are as follows: (1) the paradigmatic and syntagmatic dimensions are interdependent and (2) the syntagmatic dimension is not necessarily temporally ordered.
2.3.7. “LABELED” AND “UNLABELED”
So far we have identified only two types of possible relations for paradigmatically related units: they can be in a relation of contrast or free variation. It often happens that of two units that are in a contrast relationship (for simplicity we can limit ourselves to binomial contrasts), one acts as positive, or marked, while the other is as neutral, or unmarked. Let us explain with an example what is meant by these terms. Most English nouns have plural and singular cognates, like words like boys: boy, days: day, birds: bird, etc. The plural is marked with a final s, whereas the singular is unmarked. Another way of expressing the same thing is to say that in a given context the presence of a certain unit contrasts with its absence. When this situation occurs, the unlabeled form usually has a more general meaning or wider distribution than the labeled form. In this regard, it has become common to use the terms "marked" and "unmarked" in a somewhat more abstract sense, so that the marked and unmarked members of a contrasting pair do not necessarily differ in the presence or absence of any particular unit. For example, from a semantic point of view, the words dog and bitch are respectively unmarked and marked in relation to gender opposition. The word dog is semantically unmarked (or neutral), since it can refer to both males and females (That"s a lovely dog you"ve got there: is it a he or a she? "You have a charming dog: is it he or she ?"). However, bitch is marked (or positive) because its use is limited to females, and it can be used in contrast to an unmarked term, defining the latter's meaning as negative rather than neutral (Is it a dog or a bitch? "Is it a dog or a bitch?" ). In other words, an unmarked term has a more general meaning, neutral with respect to a specific opposition; its more specific negative meaning is derivative and secondary, being a consequence of its contextual opposition with a positive (not neutral) term. The special nature of the relationship between the words dog and bitch is the explanation for the fact that female dog and male dog are perfectly acceptable, while the combinations female bitch and male bitch are semantically anomalous: one is tautological, and the other is contradictory. The concept of “markedness” within paradigmatic oppositions is extremely important for all levels of linguistic structure.
2.3.8. SYNTAGMATIC LENGTH
Here we can make a final general statement regarding the connection between the paradigmatic and syntagmatic dimensions. If given a set of units distinguished by the "lower level" elements of which they are composed, then (independent of certain statistical considerations which will be considered in the next section) the length of each of the "higher level" units, measured in terms of number syntagmatically associated elements identifying a given complex will be inversely proportional to the number of elements that are in relation to paradigmatic contrast within this complex. Suppose, for example, that some system has only two elements of an expression (which we will call 0 and 1) and that some other system has eight elements of an expression (which we will number 0 to 7); for the sake of simplicity, since such an assumption does not affect the general principle, let us assume that any combination of elements of expression is resolved by “phonological” rules to which both systems obey. To distinguish eight "phonological" words within the first (binary) system, each word must consist of at least three elements (000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, 111), while in the second (octal) ) the system needs one element (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) to distinguish each of the eight words. To distinguish 64 words, complexes consisting of at least six elements are needed in the binary system, and in the octal system - at least two elements. In general, the maximum number of “higher level” units that can be distinguished by a certain set of “lower level” elements syntagmatically related in complexes is determined by the formula: N= p 1 ? R 2 ? R 3 ... p m(Where N- number of “highest level” units, m- number of positions of paradigmatic contrast for elements of the “lower level”, p 1 denotes the number of elements entering into the relation of paradigmatic contrast in the first position, R 2 denotes the number of elements entering into the relation of paradigmatic contrast in the second position, and so on until m-th position). Note that this formula does not assume that the same elements can appear in all positions, nor that the number of elements in paradigmatic contrast is the same in all positions. What was said above in connection with the simple example of the binary and octal systems, within which all elements occur in all positions and any syntagmatic combinations are possible, is therefore no more than a special case falling under the more general formula:
2? 2? 2 = 8, 2 ? 2? 2? 2 = 16, etc.
8 = 8, 8 ? 8 = 64.8? 8 ? 8 = 512, etc.
The reason we chose to compare the binary system (with two elements) and the octal system (with eight elements) is the fact that 8 is an integer power of 2: it is 2 to the 3rd power, not 2 to the power of 3.5 or 4.27, etc. This clearly reveals the connection between paradigmatic contrast and syntagmatic “length”. All other things being equal, the minimum length of words in the binary system is three times the length of words in the octal system. We use this particular numerical relationship in the next section. In subsequent chapters, especially the chapter on semantics, we will turn to the more general principle that linguistically significant distinctions can be made on the basis of both syntagmatic and paradigmatic criteria.
Note that the concept of “length” that we have just examined is defined depending on the number of positions of paradigmatic contrast within the syntagmatic complex. It is not necessarily related to time sequence. This point (following from what was said earlier in this section - see § 2.3.6) is very significant for the subsequent discussion of phonological, grammatical and semantic structures.
2.4. STATISTICAL STRUCTURE
Not all paradigmatic oppositions, or contrasts, are equally essential for the functioning of language. They can differ significantly from each other in their functional load. To clarify the meaning of this term, we can consider some contrasts within the phonological system of the English language.
The substantial realization of many words of spoken English differs in that in the same environment in some cases [p] is found, and in others - [b] (cf. pet: bet, pin: bin, pack: back, cap: cab etc.); on the basis of this contrast we can establish an opposition between /p/ - /b/, which, at least at this stage, we can consider as the two minimal elements of language expression (by “minimal” we further mean an indecomposable unit). Since many words are distinguished by the opposition /p/ - /b/, the contrast between these two elements carries a high functional load. Other oppositions carry a lower functional load. For example, a relatively small number of words differ in substantial realization by having one rather than the other of two consonants that occur in final position in wreath and wreathe (the International Phonetic Alphabet symbols for these two sounds are [? ] and [?]; cf. § 3.2.8); very few words, if any, are distinguished from each other by the contrast between the sound at the beginning of ship and the sound represented by the second consonant in measure or leisure (these two sounds are designated [?] and [?] respectively in the International Phonetic Alphabet). ). The functional load of the contrasts between [?] and [?] and between [?] and [?] is thus much lower than the functional load of the contrast /p/: /b/.
The importance of functional load is obvious. If speakers of a language do not consistently retain those contrasts that make utterances with different meanings different from each other, misunderstandings may result. All other things being equal (we'll come back to this), the higher the functional load, the more important it is for speakers to master a particular contrast as part of their "speech skills" and to consistently retain it in their language use. It should therefore be expected that children first master the contrasts that carry the highest functional load in the language they hear; Accordingly, contrasts with a high functional load also seem to be better preserved during the transmission of language from one generation to the next. By observing the ease with which children master the contrasts of their native languages, and by studying the historical development of individual languages, we gain some empirical support for these assumptions. However, in each case there are additional factors that interact with the principle of functional load and which are difficult to separate from the latter. We will not consider these factors here.
Accurate assessment of functional load is made more difficult, if not outright impossible, by considerations that the ceteris paribus clause has allowed us to temporarily disregard. Firstly, the functional load of an individual opposition between elements of an expression varies depending on structural position occupied by them in the word. For example, two elements may often be contrasted at the beginning of a word, but very rarely at the end of a word. Do we simply take the average of all contrast positions? The answer to this question is not clear.
Secondly, the meaning of a particular contrast between elements of an expression is not simply a function of the number of words they distinguish: it also depends on whether these words can occur and contrast in the same context. Let's take the limiting case: if A and B are two classes of words that are in complementary distribution, and each member of class A differs in substantial implementation from some member of class B only in that it contains the element /a/ where in the corresponding word from B presents the element /b/, then the functional load of the contrast between /a/ and /b/ is equal to zero. Thus, the functional load of an individual opposition should be calculated for words that have the same or partially overlapping distribution. It is also clear that any “realistic” criterion for assessing the meaning of a particular contrast must take into account not simply the distribution of words established by grammatical rules, but actual utterances that could be confused if this contrast was not preserved. For example, how often or under what circumstances would an utterance such as You"d better get a cab be confused with You"d better get a cap if the speaker did not distinguish between the final consonants of cab and cap? The answer to this question is obviously essential to any accurate assessment of the contrast in question.
Finally, the significance of an individual contrast appears to be related to frequency his occurrence(which is not necessarily determined by the number of words it distinguishes). Let us assume that three elements of the expression - /x/, /y/ and /z/ - occur in the same structural position in words of the same distributional class. But suppose further that while words containing /x/ and /y/ are often contrasted in language (they are high-frequency words), words containing /z/ are characterized by low frequency of occurrence (although they may be just as are numerous in the dictionary). If a native speaker does not master the contrast between /x/ and /z/, communication will be less difficult for him than if he does not master the contrast between /x/ and /y/.
Functional load of the last contrast, ex hypothesi, higher than the first.
The considerations expressed in the previous paragraphs show how difficult it is to arrive at any precise criterion for assessing functional load. The various criteria proposed by linguists so far cannot claim accuracy, despite their mathematical sophistication. Nevertheless, we should make room in our theory of linguistic structure for the concept of functional load, which is undoubtedly very important both synchronically and diachronically. Obviously, it still makes sense to say that certain contrasts carry a higher functional load than some others, even if the relevant differences cannot be precisely measured.
2.4.2. QUANTITY OF INFORMATION AND PROBABILITY OF APPEARANCE
Another important statistical concept relates to quantity information, which is carried by a linguistic unit in some given context; it is also determined by its frequency of occurrence in that context (or so it is generally believed). The term “information” is used here in the special meaning that it acquired in communication theory and which we will now explain. The information content of an individual unit is determined as a function of its probabilities. Let's take the simplest case first: if the probabilities of two or more units appearing in some given context are equal, each of them carries the same amount of information in that context. Probability is related to frequency as follows. If two, and only two, equally probable units - X And at- can occur in the context under consideration, each of them occurs (on average) in exactly half of all relevant cases: the probability of each, a priori, is 1/2. Let us denote the probability of an individual unit X through p x. So in this case p x= 1/2 and RU= 1/2. More generally, the probability of each n equally probable units ( x 1 , X 2 , X 3 , . . ., x n) is equal to 1/ n. (Note that the sum of the probabilities of the entire set of units is equal to 1. This is true regardless of the more specific condition of equal probability. A special case of probability is "certainty". The probability of occurrence of units that cannot fail to appear in a given context is equal to 1.) If the units are equally probable , each of them carries the same amount of information.
More interesting, because they are more typical of language, are unequal probabilities. Suppose, for example, that there are two, and only two, units, X And at, So what X occurs on average twice as often as at, Then p x= 2/3 and RU= 1/3. Information content x half the content at. In other words, the amount of information inversely probability (and, as we will see, logarithmically related to it): this is a fundamental principle of information theory.
At first glance this may seem a little strange. However, let us first consider the limiting case of complete predictability. In written English, the appearance of the letter u when it follows a q is almost entirely predictable; If we ignore some borrowed words and proper names, we can say that it is completely predictable (its probability is 1). Similarly, the probability of the word to in sentences such as I want. . . go home, I asked him. . . help me (assuming only one word is missing) is equal to 1. If we decided to omit the u (in queen, queer, inquest, etc.) or the word to in the mentioned contexts, no information would be lost (here we see the connection between the ordinary and the more specialized meaning of the word “information”). Since the letter u and the word to are not in paradigmatic contrast with any other units of the same level that might occur in the same context, their probability of occurrence is 1 and their information content is 0; They entirely redundant. Let us now consider the case of binomial contrast, where p x= 2/3 and RU= 1/3. No member is entirely redundant. But it's clear that the pass X leads to fewer consequences than skipping at. Since the appearance X twice as likely as occurrence at, the recipient of the message (knowing the prior probabilities) has on average twice the chances of “guessing” the omission X than to “guess” the pass at. Thus, redundancy manifests itself to varying degrees. Redundancy X twice as much as redundancy at. In general, the more likely a unit is to appear, the larger the degree her redundancy(and the lower its information content).
2.4.3. BINARY SYSTEMS
The amount of information is usually measured in bits(this term comes from the English binary digit "binary sign"). Each unit with a probability of occurrence of 1/2 contains one bit of information; Each unit carries 2 bits of information with a probability of 1/4, and so on. The convenience of such a measurement of the amount of information will become obvious if we turn to the practical problem of “coding” a set of units (we first assume that the probabilities of their occurrence are equal) by groups of binary characters. In the previous section we saw that each element of a set of eight ones can be realized by a separate group of three binary characters (see § 2.3.8). This is determined by the connection between the number 2 ( basis binary number system) and 8 (the number of units that need to be distinguished): 8 = 2 3. More generally, if N is the number of units to be distinguished, a m is the number of contrast positions in groups of binary characters required to distinguish them, then N = 2m. The relationship between the number of paradigmatic contrasts at the “highest” level ( N) and the syntagmatic length of groups of elements of the “lowest” level ( m), thus logarithmic: m= log 2 N. (The logarithm of a number is the power to which the base of a number system must be raised to obtain a given number. If N= x m, That m=log x N"If N equals X to a degree m, That m equals logarithm N based on x"Recall that in decimal arithmetic, the logarithm of 10 is 1, the logarithm of 100 is 2, the logarithm of 1000 is 3, etc., i.e. log 10 10 = 1, log 10 100 = 2, log 10 1000 = 3 and etc. If information theory were based on a decimal rather than a binary system of measurement, it would be more convenient to define the unit of information in terms of probability 1/10. It should be clear to the reader that the equation given here N = 2m- this is a special case of equality N= R 1 ? R 2 ? R 3 , ..., p m, introduced in § 2.3.8. Equality N = 2m it is true if in each position of the syntagmatic group in the paradigmatic contrast there is the same number of elements.
The amount of information is usually measured in bits, simply because many mechanical systems for storing and transmitting information operate on the basis of a binary principle: they are systems with two states. For example, information can be encoded on magnetic tape (for processing by a digital computer) as a sequence of magnetized and non-magnetized positions (or groups of positions): each position is in one of two possible states and can thus carry one bit of information. In addition, information can be transmitted (as, for example, in Morse code) in the form of a sequence of “pulses”, each of which takes one of two values: short or long in duration, positive or negative in electrical charge, etc. Any system , using an "alphabet" consisting of more than two elements, can be re-encoded into a binary system at the source of transmission and re-encoded again into the original "alphabet" when the message is received at its destination. This occurs, for example, when transmitting messages by telegraph. That information content should be measured in base-2 logarithms rather than logarithms in some other numerical base is a consequence of the fact that communications engineers typically work with two-state systems. As for the question of the appropriateness of applying the principle of binary “coding” specifically when studying language under normal conditions of “transmission” from speaker to listener, it causes significant disagreement among linguists. There is no doubt that many of the most important phonological, grammatical and semantic distinctions are binary, as we will see in subsequent chapters; we have already seen that one of the two terms of a binary opposition can be regarded as positive, or marked, and the other as neutral, or unmarked (see § 2.3.7). We will not go into a discussion here of whether all linguistic units can be reduced to complexes of hierarchically ordered binary “choices.” The fact that many units (at all levels of linguistic structure) are reducible to them means that the linguist must learn to think in terms of binary systems. At the same time, one should be aware that the fundamental ideas of information theory are completely independent of particular assumptions regarding binaryness.
2.4.4. UNEQUAL PROBABILITIES
Since each binary character carries only one bit of information, a group of m binary characters can carry a maximum m bits Until now we have assumed that the probabilities of higher-level units distinguished in this way are equal. Now consider a more interesting and more common case when these probabilities are not equal. For simplicity, we take a set of three units, A, b And With, with the following probabilities: r a= 1/2, p b= 1/4, p with= 1/4. Unit A carries 1 bit, and b And With each carries 2 bits of information. These can be encoded in a binary implementation system as A : 00, b: 01 and With: 10 (leaving 11 unoccupied). But if the characters were transmitted in sequence over some communication channel, and the transmission and reception of each character took the same period of time, it would be unreasonable to accept such an inefficient encoding condition. After all, for A would require the same channel power as for b and for With, although it would carry half as much information. It would be more economical to code A using one sign, say 1, and distinguish b And With from A, encoding them with the opposite sign - 0 - in the first position; b And With would then differ from each other in the second contrast position (which, of course, is empty for A). So, A: 1, b: 00 and With: 01. This second convention makes more economical use of channel capacity, since it maximizes the amount of information carried by each one- or two-character group. Because on transfer A, which occurs twice as often as b And c, spending half as much time, this solution would allow the largest number of messages to be transmitted in the shortest time (assuming that these messages are long enough or numerous enough to reflect average frequencies of occurrence). In reality, this simple system represents a theoretical ideal: each of the three units a, b And With carries an integer number of bits of information and is realized in a substance by precisely this number of differences.
2.4.5. REDUNDANCY AND NOISE
This theoretical ideal is never achieved in practice. First of all, the probabilities of the appearance of units are usually between the values of the series 1, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, . . . , 1/2 m, but do not correspond to them exactly. For example, a single unit may have a probability of 1/5 of occurrence, so it may convey log 2 5 - approximately 2.3 - bits of information. But in substance there is no difference measured by the number 0.3; substantial differences are absolute in the sense explained above (see § 2.2.10). If we use three signs to identify one with a probability of occurrence of 1/5, we thereby introduce redundancy into substantial realization. (The average redundancy of a system can be made as small as desired; mathematical communication theory is primarily concerned with this problem. But we need not go into more technical detail here.) The important point is that some degree of redundancy is in fact desirable in any communication system. The reason here is that whatever medium is used for the purpose of transmitting information, it will be subject to various unpredictable natural disturbances which will destroy or distort part of the message and thus lead to loss of information. If the system were free of redundancy, the loss of information would be irreplaceable. Communications engineers refer to random interference in a medium or communication channel with the term noises. The optimal system for a single channel is one that has just enough redundancy to allow the receiver to recover information lost due to noise. Note that the terms “channel” and “noise” should be interpreted in the most general sense. Their use is not limited to acoustic systems, and especially to systems created by engineers (telephone, TV, telegraph, etc.). Distortions in handwriting resulting from writing on a moving train can also be classified as “noise”; this also includes distortions that occur in speech during a runny nose, in a state of intoxication, from absent-mindedness or memory errors, etc. (Typos are one of the consequences of the influence of noise when “coding” written language; the reader often does not notice them because redundancy , characteristic of most written sentences, is sufficient to neutralize the distorting influence of random errors. Typos are more significant in a chain of characters, any combination of which a priori possible. In practice, this is taken into account by accountants who deliberately enter redundant information into their books, requiring a balance of amounts in different columns. The custom of marking the amount due on checks in both words and figures enables banks to detect, if not correct, many errors caused by noise of one kind or another.) As regards spoken language, the term "noise" includes any source of distortion or misunderstanding, whether it refers to shortcomings in the speech activity of the speaker and listener or to the acoustic conditions of the physical environment in which utterances are made.
2.4.6. BRIEF SUMMARY OF THE BASIC PRINCIPLES OF INFORMATION THEORY
Since the early 1950s. Communication theory (or information theory) has a major influence on many other sciences, including linguistics. Its main principles can be summarized as follows:
(i) All communication is based on opportunity choice, or selection, from many alternatives. In the chapter on semantics, we will see that this principle gives us an interpretation of the term “meaningful” (in one of the senses): a linguistic unit at any level does not have meaning in some given context if it is completely predictable in that context.
(ii) Information content varies inversely with probability. The more predictable a unit is, the less meaning it carries. This principle fits well with the opinion of stylists that clichés (or “clichés” and “dead metaphors”) are less effective than more “original” figures of speech.
(iii) The redundancy of the substantial implementation of a linguistic unit (its “coding”) is measured by the difference between the number of distinctive features of a substance required for its identification and its information content. A certain degree of redundancy is necessary to counteract noise. Our previous discussion about the stability of the substance in which language is realized, and about the need for some “margin of safety” to distinguish between the realizations of contrasting elements, can also be subsumed under the more general principle of redundancy (cf. § 2.2.10).
(iv) A language will be more efficient (from an information theory point of view) if the syntagmatic length of units is inversely proportional to the probability of their occurrence. That such a principle does have force in language is demonstrated by the fact that the most commonly used words and expressions tend to be shorter. It was at first an empirical observation rather than a deductive (testable) conclusion from certain theoretical premises; Subsequently, to express the relationship between length and frequency of use, a special formula was developed, known as “Zipf’s law” (named after its author). (We will not present here “Zipf’s law” or discuss its mathematical and linguistic basis; it has undergone modifications in subsequent works.) At the same time, it should be recognized that the length of a word in letters or sounds (in the sense in which we used the term "sound" still) does not necessarily serve as a direct measure of syntagmatic length. This extremely important point (to which we will return) has not always been emphasized in statistical studies of language.
2.4.7. DIACHRONIC IMPLICATIONS
Because language develops over time and "evolves" to meet the changing needs of society, it can be seen as homeostatic(or “self-regulating”) system; Moreover, the state of the language at any given moment is “regulated” by two opposing principles. The first of these (sometimes called the principle of "least effort") is the tendency to maximize the efficiency of the system (in the sense in which the word "efficiency" was interpreted above); its effect is to bring the syntagmatic length of words and statements closer to the theoretical ideal. Another principle is to “strive to be understood”; it inhibits the principle of least effort by introducing redundancy at different levels. One should therefore expect a desire to maintain, under changing conditions of communication, both tendencies in balance. From the fact that the average amount of noise is constant for different languages and different stages of development of one language, it follows that the degree of language redundancy is constant. Unfortunately, it is impossible (at least at present) to test the hypothesis that languages maintain both of these opposing principles in “homeostatic equilibrium.” (We will address this issue below.) Nevertheless, this hypothesis is promising. Its probability is supported by “Zipf’s law”, as well as the tendency (noted long before the beginning of the information-theoretic era) to replace words with longer (and more “bright”) synonyms, especially in spoken language, in cases where the frequent use of certain words deprives them of their “power” (reducing their information content). The extreme speed of change of slang expressions is explained precisely by this.
The phenomenon of “homonymous conflict” and its diachronic resolution (illustrated with great completeness by Gilleron and his followers) can also be explained. A “homonymous conflict” can arise when the principle of “least effort,” acting together with other factors that determine sound changes, leads to a decrease or destruction of the “margin of safety” necessary to distinguish between the substantial realizations of two words, and thus to the formation of homonymy. (The term “homonymy” today is usually used in relation to both homophony and homography; cf. § 1.4.2. In this case, we mean, of course, homophony.) If homonyms are more or less equally probable in a large number contexts, the "conflict" is usually resolved by replacing one of these words. A well-known example is the disappearance in modern English literary language of the word quean (originally meaning "woman" and later "whore" or "prostitute"), which came into "conflict" with the word queen as a result of the loss of the previously existing distinction between vowels, represented orthographically as ea and ee. The best-known example of a homonymous conflict in the literature is probably the case of the words meaning "cat" and "rooster" in the dialects of southwestern France. Distinguished as cattus and gallus in Latin, both words, as a result of sound changes, merged into . The "conflict" was resolved by replacing the word = "rooster" with various other words, including local variants of faisan ("pheasant") or vicaire ("vicar"). The use of the second of these seems to be based on a previously existing connection in “slang” usage between “cock” and “curate”. A very rich literature is devoted to the topic of “homonymy” (see bibliography at the end of the book).
2.4.8. CONDITIONAL PROBABILITIES OF APPEARANCE
As we have seen, the appearance of a separate unit (sound or letter, unit of expression, word, etc.) can be fully or partially determined by the context. We must now clarify the concept of contextual determination (or conditioning) and draw out the implications it has for linguistic theory. For simplicity, we will first limit our attention to consideration of contextual determination operating within syntagmatically related units of one level of linguistic structure; in other words, for the moment we will neglect the very important point that complexes of lower-level units realize higher-level units, which themselves have contextually determined probabilities.
We will use symbols X And at as variables, each of which denotes a separate unit or a syntagmatically related group of units; in addition, we will assume that X And at themselves are in a syntagmatic connection. (For example, at the expression unit level X may indicate /b/ or /b/ + /i/, and at- /t/ or /i/ + /t/; at the word level X can mean men "men" or old "old" + men, and at- sing “sing” or sing + beautifully “beautiful”.) How X, so at have an average a priori probability of occurrence - p x And RU respectively. Similarly, the combination X + at has an average probability of occurrence, which we denote as p xy.
In the limiting case of statistical independence between X And at probability of combination X+at will be equal to the product of the probabilities X And at: r xy= p x ? RU. This fundamental principle of probability theory can be illustrated through a simple numerical example. Consider the numbers from 10 to 39 (inclusive) and denote by X And at digits 2 and 7 in the first and second positions of their decimal representation: combination x And at will thus denote the number 27. Within the range of numbers under consideration (assuming that all 30 numbers are equally probable) p x= 1/3 and p y= 1/10. If we "thought of a number between 10 and 39" and asked someone to guess the number they had in mind, their chance of guessing correctly (without the help of other information) would be one in thirty: p xy= 1/30. But let's say that we told him that this number is a multiple of 3. Clearly, his chance of guessing correctly increases to 1/10. From our point of view, what is more significant (since we consider the probability of the appearance of one sign in the context of another) is that the choice of one of the two signs is no longer statistically independent of the choice of the other. Probability at, if given that X= 2, equals 1/3, since only three numbers are multiples of 3 in this series (21, 24, 27); and the probability x, if given that at= 7 is equal to 1, since only one number within a given series ends in 7 and is a multiple of 3. We can denote these equalities as p y (x) = 1/3 and p x (at) = 1. Conditional probability appearance at in the context X is equal to 1/3, and the conditional probability X given at is equal to 1. (The two expressions “in context” and “given” should be understood as equivalent; both are common in works of statistical linguistics.) To generalize this example: if p x (at) = p x(that is, if the probability X in the context at equal to its a priori, unconditional, probability), then X is statistically independent of at; if the probability of occurrence X increases or decreases with the appearance at, that is, if p x (at) > p x or p x (at) > p x, That X"positively" or "negatively" determined at. The extreme case of “positive” conditioning is, of course, complete redundancy with p x (at) = 1 (at assumes X), and the extreme case of “negative” conditionality is “impossibility”, that is p x (at) = 0 (at excludes X). It is important to keep in mind that contextual conditioning can be either “positive” or “negative” (as those terms are used here), and also that the likelihood X given at not always, or rather, only in rare cases, equal to probability at given X.
A necessary condition for the results of any statistical study to be of interest to linguistics is the distinction between different types of conditioning. As we saw above, syntagmatic relationships can be linear or non-linear; therefore the conditioning may be linear or nonlinear. If X And at linearly related, then for any p x (at) we are dealing with progressive conditionality in cases where at preceded X, and with regressive in cases where at follows X. Whether conditioning is progressive or regressive, X And at can be directly adjacent (located nearby in a linearly ordered syntagmatic complex); in this case, if X due to at, we are talking about transitional(transitional) conditioning. Many popular accounts of the statistical structure of language tend to portray the matter as if conditional probabilities operating at all levels of linguistic structure necessarily imply linear, transitive, and progressive conditioning. This, of course, is not so. For example, the conditional probability of a certain noun appearing as the subject or object of a certain verb in Latin does not depend on the relative order in which the words occur in the temporal sequence (cf. § 2.3.5); the use of the prefixes un- and in- in English (in words such as unchanging and invariable) is regressive; the possibility of the appearance of a certain unit of expression at the beginning of a word can be “positively” or “negatively” determined by the presence of a certain unit of expression at the end of the word (or vice versa), etc.
Of course, it is possible in principle to calculate the conditional probability of any unit relative to any context. It is essential, however, to correctly choose the context and direction of conditioning (that is, say, count p x (at), but not p y (x)) in the light of what is already known about the general syntagmatic structure of language. (Specific class of units X may presuppose or allow the appearance of units of another class syntagmatically related to it Y at a certain place in relation to it (and may also exclude the possibility of the appearance of units of the third class Z). Provided this is the case, one can calculate the conditional probability of an individual class member Y). The results will be of statistical interest if and only if p x (at) or p y (x) will differ significantly from p x And p y.
2.4.9. POSITIONAL PROBABILITIES OF ENGLISH CONSONANTS
Probabilities can also be calculated for individual structural positions. For example, in Table 4, for each of the 12 consonants of spoken English, 3 sets of probabilities are given: (i) a priori probability, average for all positions; (ii) probability in word-initial position before vowels; (iii) probability in word-final position after vowels.
Table 4
Probabilities of some English consonants in different positions in a word
| "Absolute" | Initial | Ultimate | |
|---|---|---|---|
| [t] | 0,070 | 0,072 | 0,105 |
| [n] | 0,063 | 0,042 | 0,127 |
| [l] | 0,052 | 0,034 | 0,034 |
| [d] | 0,030 | 0,037 | 0,039 |
| [h] | 0,026 | 0,065 | - |
| [m] | 0,026 | 0,058 | 0,036 |
| [k] | 0,025 | 0,046 | 0,014 |
| [v] | 0,019 | 0,010 | 0,048 |
| [f] | 0,017 | 0,044 | 0,010 |
| [b] | 0,016 | 0,061 | 0,0005 |
| [p] | 0,016 | 0,020 | 0,008 |
| [g] | 0,015 | 0,027 | 0,002 |
You can notice significant differences in the frequency of individual consonants in different positions in the word. For example, of the listed units [v] is the least frequent at the beginning of a word, but the third most frequent at the end of a word; on the other hand, [b] is the third most frequent unit in word-initial position, but the least frequent in word-final position (with the exception of [h], which does not occur at all at the end. NB: we are talking about sounds, not letters). Others (like [t]) have high probability or (like [g] and [p]) low probability for both positions. Also note that the range of fluctuations between the highest and lowest probabilities is greater for the end of a word than for the beginning. Facts of this kind are reflected in the description of the statistical structure of phonological words in the English language.
We said above (in connection with “Zipf’s law”; see § 2.4.6) that the number of sounds or letters in a word is not a direct measure of its syntagmatic length, defined in terms of information theory. The reason for this, of course, is that not all sounds or letters are equally likely to occur in the same context. If the probability of a phonological or orthographic word were directly related to the probabilities of its constituent expression elements, one could obtain the word probability by multiplying the probabilities of the expression elements for each structural position in the word. For example, if X twice as likely at in the starting position, and A twice as likely b in the final position, we can expect that khra will occur twice as often as yra or xpb, and four times more often than ypb. But this assumption is not justified in specific cases, as is clear from considering a few English words. Elements of expression realized by [k] and [f] are more or less equally likely at the beginning of a word, but call is much more common than fall (as various published frequency lists for English words show); although an element realized by [t] is nearly 50 times more likely to appear in word-final position than an element realized by [g], big is about 4 times more likely to appear than bit, etc.
The starting and ending position probabilities used for these calculations (see Table 4) are based on connected text analysis. This means that the frequency of occurrence of a particular consonant occurring in a relatively small number of high-frequency words may exceed the frequency of another consonant occurring in a very large number of low-frequency words (cf. the remarks made in § 2.4.1 in connection with the concept of “functional load” ). The consonant [?], which occurs at the beginning of such English words as the, then, their, them, etc., illustrates the effect of this preponderance. In initial position it is the most frequent of all consonants with a probability of about 0.10 (cf. probability 0.072 for [t], 0.046 for [k], etc.). But this consonant occurs only in a handful of different words (less than thirty in modern language). On the contrary, we find initial [k] in many hundreds of different words, although the probability of its occurrence in a connected text is more than half that of the occurrence of [?]. A comparison of all English words realized as consonant + vowel + consonant (which is itself a very common structure for English phonological words) shows that in general there are more words with a high-frequency initial and final consonant than words with a low-frequency initial and final consonant. and that the former, moreover, usually have a greater frequency of occurrence. At the same time, it should be emphasized that some words are significantly more frequent or significantly less frequent than would be predicted based on the probabilities of their constituent elements of expression.
2.4.10. "LAYERS" OF CONDITIONING
Although we have so far considered the question of contextual determination in relation to the conditional probabilities existing among units of the same level, it is clear that the occurrence of a particular element of expression is determined to a very large extent by the contextual probability of the phonological word in which it appears. For example, each of the three words spelled book, look and took is characterized by frequent occurrence: they differ from each other phonologically (and orthographically) only by the initial consonant.
From the point of view of the grammatical structure of English, the probability of a contrast between these three words in actual utterances is relatively small (and completely unrelated to the probabilities of initial consonants). The word took differs from the other two in a number of respects, most notably in that it implements the past tense of the verb. Therefore, it appears more freely than look and book, appearing next to words and phrases such as yesterday or last year (for look and book, the phonological words corresponding to took are words written as looked and booked); further, the subject of took can be he “he”, she “she” or it “it” or a singular noun (he took “he took”, etc., but not he look or he book, etc. . P.); and finally, it cannot occur after to (for example, I am going to took is unacceptable). But the words book and look are also grammatically different. Each of these can be used as a noun or verb in the appropriate context (it should be remembered that a phonological word can be a realization of more than one grammatical word; see § 2.2.11). Although look is much more common as a verb ("to look"), and book - as a noun ("book"), this difference is less significant compared with such grammatical facts of a non-statistical nature as the fact that the word book is a verb (i.e. “to order”, etc.), in contrast to look, can have a noun or a noun phrase in the function of a direct object (I will book my seat “I will book a place”, Not is going to book my friend for speeding “He is going to prosecute my friend for speeding"; the word look is impossible here); look usually requires a “prepositional combination” (I will look into the matter “I will look at [this] object”; lit., “I will look into [this] object”, They never look at me “They never look at me” ; the word book is not possible here). Apparently, in most English utterances uttered by speakers in everyday speech, the confusion of the words book and look is excluded due to grammatical restrictions of one kind or another. And this is quite typical of minimally contrastive phonological words in English.
But consider now the relatively small set of utterances in which both book and look are grammatically acceptable. It is not at all difficult for a native English speaker to imagine such statements; on occasion they may be produced or heard. An example would be I looked for the theater “I was looking for the theater”: I booked for the theater “I reserved a seat at the theater.” It may be assumed, for the sake of proof, that all but the initial consonants of booked or looked were “transmitted” to the listener in these utterances, without significant distortion due to “noise” in the “channel”. In this case, the listener will be faced with the need to predict, based on redundancies in the language and given the situation of the utterance, which of the two words the speaker meant. (For simplicity, let's assume that cooked "cooked" etc. are impossible or very unlikely in this situation.) Although we might assume that looked is much more common than booked in any representative sample of English utterances, it is clear to us that the appearance of theater significantly increases the likelihood of the word booked. It is very difficult to say which of the words - booked or looked - is more likely to be combined with for the theatre, but in a given situation the choice of one of them may be determined to a greater extent than the other. This is evident from the comparison of the following two, longer statements:
(i) I looked for the theatre, but I couldn't find it. “I looked for the theater, but didn’t find it.”
(ii) I booked for the theater, but I lost the tickets. "I reserved a seat at the theater, but I lost my tickets."
The word booked appears to be contextually excluded in (i), and looked in (ii). However, the situation itself, including the previous conversation, can also introduce various “presuppositions”, the determining power of which is no lower than that of the words but and couldn't find in (i) and but and tickets in (ii). If this is so, then these presuppositions will already “determine” that the listener will “predict” (that is, in fact, hear) looked, and not booked (or vice versa) in a shorter “frame” I -ooked for the theater. For now, we can designate these probabilities , inferred from the co-occurrence of one word with another and the “presuppositions” of the particular situation of the utterance, as “semantic.” (In subsequent chapters we will distinguish different levels of acceptability within what we here refer to as “semantics.”)
Our example was greatly simplified: we identified only three levels of conditioning (phonological, grammatical and semantic) and assumed that only one unit of expression is lost, or distorted, due to “noise”. These simplifications, however, do not affect the general conclusion. If we turn to the consideration of specific utterances, this will lead to the recognition that semantic probabilities are more important than grammatical ones, and grammatical ones are more important than phonological ones. Since it is impossible (at least in the current state of linguistic research) to identify all the semantically relevant factors of external situations in which individual utterances appear, it also turns out to be impossible to calculate the probability, and therefore the information content of any part of them. This is one of the points that we have already emphasized when talking about functional load and information theory (see § 2.4.1).
2.4.11. METHODOLOGICAL SOLUTION TO ONE DILEMMA
In this section, two provisions were put forward that at first glance contradict one another. According to the first, statistical considerations are essential for understanding the mechanism of functioning and development of language; according to the second, it is practically (and perhaps even fundamentally) impossible to accurately calculate the amount of information carried by various linguistic units in specific utterances. This apparent contradiction can be resolved by recognizing that linguistic theory is not concerned with how utterances are produced and understood in actual situations of use (leaving aside the relatively small class of linguistic utterances discussed in §5.2.5); it deals with the structure of sentences considered in abstraction from the situations in which real statements occur.
Notes:
R. N. Robins . The Teaehing of linguistics as a part of a university tea-ching today. - “Folia Linguistica”, 1976, Tomus IX, N 1/4, p. eleven.
A.D. Shmelev participated in the translation of chapters 2-6. - Note editorial staff.
In the original, the term “phrase” corresponds to the term “phrase”. In the British linguistic tradition, the term "phrase" refers to any group of words (for example, the table) that functions as a word. For more information, see below, § 5.1.1. - Note edit.
In Soviet science, it is more common to classify mathematical linguistics as a mathematical discipline. This, of course, does not at all prevent the use of mathematical apparatus (and in particular, mathematical logic) in linguistic research. - Note edit.
In the original, probably erroneously, it is minimal. - Note translation.
The use of to in missing places in the sentences I want to go home “I want to go home”, I asked him to help me “I asked him to help me” is a mandatory rule of English grammar. - Note translation.