form versus meaning

Edith A Moravcsik edith at CSD.UWM.EDU
Sat Jan 11 20:28:59 UTC 1997


Here is another two-bit-worth of contribution.


On Thursday, January 9, Jon Aske wrote the following:

   "But the real question when it comes to autonomy vs. non-autonomy, is
    whether the constructions of a language can, or should, be described
    independently of the semantic and pragmatic meanings which they are
    used to express, and independently, for instance, of the iconic
    and universal principles, such as topic-comment or comment-topic,
    on which they are sometimes based."

   "I don't think they can and I don't think they should. The simple
    reason for this is that I do not think that that is how humans learn
    or store the constructions of a language. Form is always stored and
    intimately connected to function and that is how it should be
    described and analyzed."


I detect a slight non-sequitur here unless a hidden assumption is made
explicit. If the goal is to describe how people learn and store
constructions - and provided that it is indeed true that this happens
always in terms of form and meaning being inseparable - then, indeed,
the forms of constructions cannot and should not be described without
their meanings. If, however, the goal is not to describe HOW people
learn and store constructions but, rather, WHAT it is that people learn and
store, then there is nothing wrong with trying to describe form
in separation from meaning.

It seems, in fact, that the description of syntactic form without regard
to meaning is both possible and necessary. This is shown as follows.

a/ THE POSSIBILITY OF DESCRIBING FORM AND MEANING SEPARATELY
   That describing syntactic form only is possible is shown by the fact
that, given a set of sentences from a language with word
boundaries indicated but no glosses provided, one can write a
syntax by specifying the distribution
(i.e., cooccurrence and order patterns) of the words. In order to make
the description general, one will want to lump words into classes.
These classes will, by definition, be
syntactic categories (rather than semantic ones) in the sense that they
were arrived at on the basis of purely syntactic (=distributional)
information.

Once the meanings of the sentences are also considered, some of the syntac-
tic categories utilized in the description may turn out to be congruent
with semantic classes while others are likely not to. I think this
is what the autonomouns versus non-autonomous syntax debate is all
about: whether there are any syntactic classes that are not also semantic
ones (which is what autonomous syntax claims) or whether all syntactically-
arrived categories coincide with classes of meaning elements. -
However, the existence of "purely syntactic categories" in the above sense
(i.e., in the sense that they are discoverable solely on the basis of
syntactic evidence) is independent of whether they also happen to
be meaningful or not.

The whole thing is analogous to a proverbial Martian coming to Earth and
undertaking to describe traffic signs. He will be able to give an account
of the signs without knowing what meanings they stand
for, by simply delimiting the basic graphic
symbols and stating rules of their cooccurrence and arrangement on the
sign boards. Once he learns what each signs means, he will discover
that some of his classes arrived at on the basis of form patterns are
meaningful while others (such as a line forming a frame around
the signs) are not.

b/ THE NECESSITY OF DECSRIBING FORM AND MEANING SEPARATELY
   Apart from the fact that one syntactic form can go with more than
one alternative meaning and the same meaning can be expressed by
alternative syntactic forms (and apart from other strictly
structural evidence regarding mismatches between meaning structures
and syntactic form), it seems that a description of syntactic
constructions with form and meaning separately represented is
necessary also as a supplement to performance-oriented descriptions of the
sort Jon Aske referred to (where what is shown is
that people learn and store forms along with meanings). This is because
in order for a fact to become an explanandum, we must be able to see
alternatives to it - ways in which things COULD be but are not.
Thus, in order for us to be able to ask "WHY do people learn
and store forms with meanings?", we have to
realize that form and meaning are separate things and, in principle,
they could be learned and stored separate. This logically possible
but empirically non-occurrent option is what the description of
syntactic constructions (as opposed to the description of
how such constructions are processed by people) supplies when it
shows meaning and syntactic form as separate entities.



   ************************************************************************
                                 Edith A. Moravcsik
                                 Department of Linguistics
                                 University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
                                 Milwaukee, WI 53201-0413
                                 USA

                                 E-mail: edith at csd.uwm.edu
                                 Telephone: (414) 229-6794 /office/
                                            (414) 332-0141 /home/
                                 Fax: (414) 229-6258









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