Language as semiosis: a neo-structuralist perspective in the light of pragmaticism

Recalling the singular appearance of the word hermeneutic in the title of any article published over the multi-year history of the journal Language (Shapiro 1980), and relying anew on Charles Sanders Peirce’s pragmaticism and his apothegm “My language is the sum total of myself,” my goal herein will be to sketch a program for reorienting linguistics in the twenty-first century, prompted by the conviction that the prevailing conception of language as rule-governed behavior tout court has driven linguistics into barren byways which are powerless to explain speech as it is manifested in nature (in the spirit of the physis versus thesis debate in Plato’s Cratylus). This sterility can be overcome by postulating as a fundamental principle the idea that the locus of linguistic reality is the act, the creative moment of speech – a moment made possible by the existing structure of language with its general rules but which transforms that structure, so that linguistic structure is itself always in flux, always being modified by acts of speech.

I begin by providing in outline form some postulates for what I call a “neo-structuralist” perspective.^[1]

Language: seven postulates

1. Language is like a piece of music or a poem – i.e. a made (aesthetic = L formosus)object, a work that unfolds in time (unlike an artwork, which is static), always dynamic, while remaining changeable and stable simultaneously.

2. Linguistic competence can only transpire in performance, and in ensembles of performances, and is not a work.

3. The ecology of language is constituted by discourse rather than structural relations.

4. The lexica (vocabularies) of speakers are discontinuous: no two speakers of a language have the same lexicon despite considerable overlap.

5. Multilingualism (unlike diglossia, pidgins, or code switching) introduces a new dimension in the discontinuity of lexica.

6. Linguistic theory is immanent in the concerted – i.e. syntagmatic – data [=performance] of language in its variety, not merely in its paradigmatic structure.

7. Hence the goal of theory is the rationalized explication of linguistic variety.

In coming to an encompassingly stereoscopic view of language – both ontologically and experientially – the above seven points are to be juxtaposed to the following two sets of three each (Figure 1):

1. Levels of patterning in language

   1. type (the specific Bauplan or underlying design of a language)

   2. norms (usage that is historically realized and codified in the given language community)

   3. system (everything functional that is productive in the language, including usage that exists in potentia)

2. Modes of being of language

   1. text (language as product – érgon)

   2. speech (language as activity – enérgeia)

   3. grammar (language as technique – dúnamis)

Speaker’s point of view			Hearer’s point of view
III TEXT			GRAMMAR
II SPEECH			SPEECH
I GRAMMAR			TEXT

1. Communicative context (speaker’s point of view)

1. Typology of context (by addressee)

	1. self (thought)	PRIVATE SPEECH
	2. intimates	(personal/informal)
	3. familiars
	4. subordinates
	5. peers
PUBLIC SPEECH	6. superiors
(impersonal/formal)	7. anonymous

Figure 1:

Typology of context represented as concentric circles from private to public.

1. Epistemic repertoire (linguistic competence)

   1. Phonology/phonetics

monolingual	A. “native” (unaccented/authentic) sounds (“one’s own” speech)
	B. “non-native” sounds (speech of “others”)
	1. allolects
	a) regional (incl. other countries)
	b) social
	c) ethnic
multilingual	2. foreign speech

1. Lexis, incl. derivation

fixed	A. Semantics (vocabulary)
	1. native (differentiated by size and depth)
	2. foreign (use of foreign words and locutions)
	B. Doxastics (beliefs, presuppositions)
	1. proverbs
	2. quotations (incl. literary references)
	C. Ludics
	1. paronomasia (puns, tropes, neologisms/nonce words)
	2. jokes, anecdotes, stories
free	3. citations of others’ utterances

1. syntax, incl. inflection

simple	A. Simple (declarative) sentences
	B. Complex sentences (modes,
	subordinate/embedded constructions)
complex	C. Linked discourse

1. Stylistics (appropriateness, incl. pragmatic and aesthetic)

fixed	A. Normative
	1. social
	a) sex
	b) age (infant/adolescent/young adult/adult/elder)
	c) status/rank (superior/equal/inferior, compatriot/foreigner)
	2. contextual (adequacy of linguistic expression to context,
	incl. “cultural baggage”)
	B. Axiological (judgments of worth)
	1. aesthetic (incl. phonostylistics and speech production)
free	2. evaluative (approval)

1. Paralinguistics

1. Additional considerations

Because he was a practicing scientist in the modern sense, Peirce is the one great philosopher who escapes my definition of a philosopher as someone who only solves problems of his own devising. This makes him also a proto-structuralist (a structuralist avant la lettre).

The essential concept of structuralism, whether applied to physics or linguistics or anthropology, is that of invariance under transformation. This makes theory, following Peirce’s whole philosophy and his pragmaticism in particular, the rationalized explication of variety: “[U]nderlying all other laws is the only tendency which can grow by its own virtue, the tendency of all things to take habits […]. In so far as evolution follows a law, the law or habit, instead of being a movement from homogeneity to heterogeneity, is growth from difformity to uniformity. But the chance divergences from laws are perpetually acting to increase the variety of the world, and are checked by a sort of natural selection and otherwise […], so that the general result may be described as ‘organized heterogeneity,’ or, better, rationalized variety” (CP 6.101).^[2] Or, translating law and habit into the appropriate phenomenological category: “Thirdness [ …] is an essential ingredient of reality” (EP 2:345).

Once we properly understand structuralism not as the putatively debunked epistemology that originated in Geneva with Saussure, but rather as the revised, essentially correct version originating with Jakobson in Prague and Hjelmslev in Copenhagen, we can recognize the patterning of Thirdness and Secondness in language – the so-called “passkey semiotic” – for what it is. Consequently, the fundamental notion of alternation between basic form and contextual variant becomes understandable as immanent in theory, and not merely a construct or an artifact of description. The importance of this notion cannot be overestimated.

A child learning its native language, for instance, is exactly in the same position as an analyst. It has to determine which linguistic form is basic, and which is a contextual variant. Take a simple example from English, that of the voiceless stops.

English voiceless (actually, tense) stops are aspirated when they are word-initial or begin a stressed syllable, as in pen, ten, Ken. They are unaspirated when immediately following word-initial s, as in spun, stun, skunk. After an s elsewhere in a word, they are normally unaspirated as well, except when the cluster is heteromorphemic and the stop belongs to an unbound morpheme; compare dis[t]end vs. dis[t?]aste. Word-final voiceless stops are optionally aspirate.

This variation makes aspiration non-distinctive (non-phonemic) in English, unlike, say, in Ancient Greek or Hindi, where aspirated stops change the meaning of words by comparison with items that have their unaspirated counterparts ceteris paribus.

I think it is only by taking such variation for what it is, i.e. the working out of Thirdness in the context of Secondness, that we can we understand what Peirce had in mind with his version of pragmatism.

Since talk of Peirce’s phenomenological categories as applied to grammar necessarily brings in a discussion of linguistic oppositions, this is the place to reconsider traditional conceptual distinctions in semiotic terms, as follows.

What needs underscoring first is the role of asymmetry in the manifestation of linguistic signs, specifically in its conceptual bond with complementarity and markedness. The unequal evaluation of the terms of oppositions in language has been an important notion of linguistic theorizing since at least the heyday of the Prague School’s chief Russian representatives – Trubetzkoy, Jakobson, and Karcevskij. The clearest early expression of its role is in Jakobson (1971 [1932]: 15), when he characterized the asymmetry of correlative grammatical forms in morphology as two antinomies: (1) between the signalization and non-signalization of A, and (2) between the non-signalization of A and the signalization of non-A. In the first case, two signs referring to the same objective reality differ in semiotic value in that the signatum of one of the signs specifies a certain “mark” A of this reality, while the meaning of the other makes no such specification. In the second case, the antinomy is between general and special meaning of the unmarked term, where the meaning of the latter can fluctuate between leaving the content of the “mark” A unspecified (neither positing nor negating it) and specifying the meaning of the unmarked term as an absence.

In focusing on the paradigmatic asymmetry of linguistic signs expressed by the polar semiotic values of marked and unmarked (superimposed on oppositions in phonology, grammar, and lexis), the early structuralists appear to have glossed over a cardinal syntagmatic consequence of markedness: complementarity. If the conceptual system which underlies and informs grammar (and language broadly conceived) consists of opposite-valued signs and sign complexes, then whatever syntagmatic coherence linguistic phenomena have in their actual manifestation must likewise be informed by principles of organization diagrammatic of this underlying asymmetry. The only aspect of the asymmetric nature of linguistic opposition that allows access to structural coherence is the complementarity of the terms of the asymmetry, the markedness values. The systematic relatability of the complementary entities and of their semiotic values is assured by the binary nature of all opposition, which balances the asymmetry of the axiological superstructure by furnishing the system of relations with the symmetry needed for the identification and perpetuation of linguistic units by learners and users.

Moreover, in explaining the cohesions between form and meaning, complementation of markedness values is seen to be the dominant mode of semiosis – so much so that replication is confined to the structure of desinences and the expression of further undifferentiated members of the hierarchy of categories. Given the common understanding of undifferentiated contexts, statuses, and categories as marked in value (Brøndal’s principle of compensation, as in Brøndal 1943), it is clear that replication is itself the marked (more narrowly defined) principle of semiosis, vis-à-vis its unmarked (less narrowly defined) counterpart, complementation.

Complementation actually has two aspects or modes of manifestation, which are semiotically distinct and need to be understood as such. The more usual effect of complementation, well-known in linguistic analysis, is the distribution of phonetic properties in complementary but mutually exclusive contexts. This widespread fact of language structure serves as a diagnostic in the determination of the non-distinctiveness of a particular feature, so that, for example, the complementary distribution of short and long vowel realizations in English before obstruents indicates the non-phonemic status of quantity (Andersen 1979). The general effect of variation rules is augmented by their correlation of complementary phonetic properties with specific contexts. More significantly, it has been discovered (Andersen 1972: 44–45) that the assignment of particular properties to particular contexts is governed by a universal semiotic principle of markedness assimilation, which assigns the unmarked value of an opposition to the unmarked context and the marked value of an opposition to the marked context. Complementary distribution can thus be understood as the semiotic instantiation of markedness assimilation.

It is not difficult to perceive that this first, familiar sense of complementation is a manifestation of symmetry, since “variation rules […] transform relations of similarity – equivalence in markedness – into relations of contiguity in phonetic realization” (Andersen 1979: 379). What has not been perceived, however, is that this form of complementation is peculiarly characteristic of the expression system of language (phonology, phonetics). By contrast, the morphophonemic system of a language largely eschews the symmetrical, replicative patterns of semiosis which are favored by phonology. Indeed, morphophonemics systematically exploits a second, less-studied form of complementation; this is antisymmetrical in its effects, as an inversion, and can accordingly be called chiastic. The predominant use of chiastic complementation is perfectly consistent with the semiotic nature of morphophonemics, which is the part of grammar that is constituted by the “relations between the contextual variants of the same linguistic sign(s)” and is contrasted with morphology, constituted by the “relations between [basic] linguistic signs” (Andersen 1969: 807). The fact that morphophonemics permits chiasmus is, in other words, in complete alignment with its function: the manifestation of morphological alternation.

Conversely, the prevalence of symmetrical modes of semiosis in the specification of the basic signs of morphology (cf. Shapiro 1972: 356–361) accords with the semiotic status of morphological units. Thus, when the constitution of hierarchically independent (invariant) entities in grammar is at issue, correspondences which reflect relations of the content level (grammatical meaning) in the relations of the expression level (sounds) function as iconic signs. More precisely, they are a variety of icon (or hypoicon in Peirce’s trichotomous classification), which Peirce called metaphors and defined as “those which represent the representative character of a representamen [= sign] by representing a parallelism in something else” (CP 2:133, emphasis mine). This idiosyncratic understanding of metaphor, reflected in Peirce’s typically crabbed diction, seems to imply that the more familiar kind of hypoicon – the diagram (image being the third) – is a more general species of sign which subsumes parallelistic semiosis (replication of relational values) and chiastic semiosis (alternation of relational values) as variants. If this is so, then the metaphoric relations of parallelism entail the characterization of the relations contracted by chiasmus as metonymic, because of the status of antisymmetry as a species of metonymy via its negational quotient (cf. Shapiro and Shapiro 1976: 10–11).

The invocation of a framework based on markedness, to explain the coherence of linguistic entities syntagmatically, also implies the ineluctable and necessary consideration of these entities as signs, as parts of a semiotic. Heretofore, things like verb stems and desinences, including their positional shapes and alternants, have been looked upon simply as artifacts of description which facilitate an economical, mutually consistent statement of distributional facts; but the semiotic analysis presented here rests on the fundamental assumption that all these linguistic units have values – markedness values – which vary coherently and uniformly in alignment with contexts and the values (hierarchy) of contexts. The fusion of stems and desinences owes its coherence, its semiotic raison d’être, to the form of the meaning on both sides of the expression/content “solidarity,” to what Hjelmslev (1969: 54–56) so astutely called “content-form” and distinguished from “expression-form.”

The coherence of linguistic units among each other is by no means a static one, for we have incontrovertible empirical evidence that languages change over time. But the fact of change must be correctly understood as a dynamic based on teleology, where the telos is greater goodness of fit (iconicity, coherence) between underlying structure and its overt manifestation in speech (cf. Anttila 1974: 19–25). For example, the picture of contemporary Russian conjugation and of its system differs strikingly little from that of Old Russian (Bulaxovskij 1958: 250–253; cf. Kiparsky 1967: 180), i.e. from the state of the language with respect to verb inflection dating as long ago as 900–1000 years! Given such a long span for testing, encompassing vast upheavals in the morphophonemics of Russian occasioned by the sound change known as the “jer shift” (cf. Isacenko 1970), we have every reason to suppose that present-day conjugation has a teleological coherence which has given shape to it diachronically, and which enables it to subsist in its present form synchronically.

Finally, note should be taken of the prominence given here, covertly in the title and explicitly in the analysis itself, to the hermeneutic aspect of linguistic theory, and its application as explanans of concrete data. In the face of continued assessments of Jakobson’s “Russian conjugation” as an “epoch-making” contribution to the “complete scientific description of the language” (Halle 1977: 140; emphasis added) and the explicitly pedagogical aim of Jakobson himself (1971 [1948]: 128), the present study and its predecessor (Shapiro 1974) argue in detail for the view that explanation cannot be achieved by the prevailing self-confinement to goals that are fundamentally (if unwittingly) non-explanatory. The rule-formalism approach of transformational-generative grammarians may or may not demonstrate anything about “a fluent Russian speaker’s knowledge of his language” (Halle 1977: 140). It is fundamentally irrelevant for linguistic theory whether it does or does not, because a theory of grammar is not a theory of knowledge but a theory of habit (in the sense of Peirce; cf. Shapiro 1976). Explanation must focus on why the data cohere as signs, and not on the mechanisms by which grammatical forms can be derived by the judicious choice and application of rules. This requirement removes predictability-via-rules from the agenda of theory. The entire recent history of linguistics shows with great clarity the feasibility of kneading data into a wide number of mutually compatible formalized configurations (“notational variants”). What is needed, however, is an attitude toward the object of study which matches the structure of that object.

Language is a system, both in its diachronic and synchronic aspects, that is informed by a pattern of inferences, deductive and abductive (cf. Andersen 1979, 1984). The role allotted to interpretation in language as a structure – to its very nature and function as a hermeneutic object – demands that the methods of inquiry into and the theory of language be homologous with the principles of its organization (cf. Itkonen 1978; Anttila 1976, 1977).

It is this very nature of language itself, the inherent organization of grammar as a patterned relationship between form and meaning, that necessitates transposing the theoretical enterprise of linguistics to another dimension, one defined by the subsumption of all linguistic analysis under the rubric of meaning or hermeneutic. As Jakobson himself put it:

Any linguistic item, from speech sounds and their constituents to discourse, partakes – each in its own way – in the cardinal, viz. semantic, tasks of language and must be interpreted with respect to its significative value. (Jakobson 1977: 5; cf. 1972: 76)