MacNeilage’s recent book ‘The origin of speech’ argues in favor of a ‘frame/content’ theory of syllable structure. (He has argued for this for years.) The terms are from Levelt. The idea is simply that the syllable is first a frame, a space within which content may be fleshed out more language-specifically. It’s more or less what can be argued (though not with complete analogy) for the relation between utterances and clauses. The utterance is a frame (as may be filled, for example, by something with no internal structure such as an interjection), and its content is whatever composite structures are being used (syntax, gestures, etc.). See The Anatomy of Meaning (CUP, 2009) for a similar idea, but not using this terminology.
I wonder whether the frame/content idea is equal to the idea of incorporation as defined by Paul Kockelman in his 2006 article ‘Residence in the world’ (Semiotica). It looks this way when we get into MacNeilage’s treatment of memes (pp309ff). I fear that the frame/content idea can go to all manner of levels of grain (as for the move/clause idea); the critical anchor on it has to be an independent argument for the ‘basic-level’ status of just that frame. Note that the syllable (MacNeilage’s ‘frame’) becomes in turn part of the content of a larger frame. It’s the core idea of the entire Item/System approach.
In the days of behaviorism (now coming back it seems), Bloomfield (1933, Chapter 2) writes about the function of language. He sets up with an example: “Suppose that Jack and Jill are walking down a lane. Jill is hungry. She sees an apple in a tree. She makes a noise with her larynx, tongue, and lips. Jack vaults the fence, climbs the tree, takes the apple, brings it to Jill, and places it in her hand. Jill eats the apple.” He points out that the speech Jill produces is a link in a chain of events. In his example, language allows a speaker’s stimulus to result in a hearer’s response. Or as Bloomfield put it: “Language enables one person to make a reaction when another person has the stimulus.”
A quibble on interjections: I’ve just read Jim Hurford’s outstanding book ‘The Origins of Meaning’. In it, he discusses interjections, as the earliest precursors of linguistic utterances. (The book withholds all discussion of complex grammar; this will come in a sequel to the book.) The problem is that he says interjections ‘have no descriptive content’ and they are ‘not about anything’ other than the speaker’s internal state. But we know from work on these objects that they are informative about things in the world. Good cases, some listed by Hurford on p173 of the book, are Yuck!, Aha!, Phew!. These tell us something about the speaker, but also about what is happening around them. They are deceptively informative, and are more than mere equivalents to the ‘barks’ or ‘chutters’ of vervet monkeys. Then on p175, he states that interjections occupy a ‘very marginal status’ in modern languages. This just isn’t true, we use them constantly. Presumably what he means is that they don’t participate much in syntactic constructions. But functionally they carry a heavy load. See Paul Kockelman’s essay on interjections in Current Anthropology (2005), and special issue of Journal of Pragmatics (1990) on the topic, edited by Felix Ameka.
(The book is a bit frustrating, hard to assess without the ‘Part 2′ which really is just the second half of the book. It reminds me of Tarantino’s film Kill Bill, which was built as a single film but for commercial reasons was just chopped in half. I am writing a review of the book.)
A language learner encounters a word, and taking it to be cognate with a known word in their own language, presumes the new word to mean the same as the old. Sometimes this sense of security is false—when, for instance, an American in Paris asks in his broken French whether there are any préservatifs in his yoghurt—hence the term false friend. False friends trick us because we so readily take surface form to indicate probable meaning. Luckily as second language learners we often become immediately aware of our error thanks to native speakers’ unexpected reactions or even overt correction. But sometimes, despite natives recognizing that we have used a word in a non-native way, we get no feedback of any inaptness. They know what we mean, and we get what we want yet without standing corrected. And perhaps even more often, although a speaker and hearer have different concepts of what a word means, this difference never surfaces. The word’s communicative effect is compatible with more than one version of its meaning. This is not a false friend, but a tolerable friend. With a tolerable friend, you might not quite have the meaning right, but you never realize it. And it never makes a difference. Like the false friend, appearances deceive, but this deception never actually matters.
Wittgenstein 1953, section 199: ‘To understand a sentence means to understand a language.’
There are no meaningful structures that do not require proper contextualization. So, to know the part is to be in control of the whole.
The puzzle of human sociality basically comes down to the apparent conflict between a drive to compete and a drive to cooperate. We do both. What drives us to do both? How do we pull off this balancing act?
Many of the puzzles are set out in Roots of Human Sociality, my 2006 book co-edited with Steve Levinson.
Where do linguistic systems get their structure? Individual ‘pieces’ of language have lives as items of their own. Each one can be invented, borrowed, changed, or forgotten more or less independently of the others. So what is it that keeps all these items lodged together in the larger systems we call languages? This blog begins with this ‘Item/System Paradox’, arising from the essential correctness of two apparently contradictory points of view, namely 1. that the unit of linguistic transmission is the individual ‘item’ (word, construction, idiom, etc), but 2. that whole linguistic systems follow spatial-historical trajectories as if they were unitary ‘organisms’. The aim is to reconcile the two positions by articulating the natural, causal connections between micro items of language and the macro systems in which they are embedded. The approach posits three distinct micro-macro frames: 1. a population frame (people in spatial, social populations), 2. a scheme frame (concepts in conceptual systems), and 3. a context frame (units of language embedded token contexts). The result is a hybrid of three interlocking components of language: social networks, cognitive structures, and the social interactions which link the two. Each component plays a key role in the causal ontology of language as a semiotic process.
