Nick Enfield

The item/system paradox

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.