linguistic axioms

[s.t. bischoff]

Hi all,

Thanks to those that responded to my previous email.

I am wondering if anyone is familiar with work explicitly stating
"linguistic axioms" that hold across the subfields. "Axiom" here being
"statements which are assumed to be true" or "fundamental assumptions of a
pre-formal theory". In the late 20th century perhaps, the notions of
"phonology", "morphology", "syntax", and "pragmatics" would seem to be
axiomatic...but would something like the "phoneme"? The phoneme raises an
interesting question in that if it were assumed to be axiomatic, then would
there need to be a unified definition of  phoneme? That is, is the Praguian
phoneme (a set of distinctive features which are not binary) a  potentially
different object than the Generative phoneme (taxonomic phenomenon, the only
relevant unit in phonology, and a set of binary features ala Chomsky and
Halle)? Thus non-axiomatic? Another example of a linguistic axiom would be
perhaps word order facts represented in terms of "subjects", "verbs", and
"objects"...but do nominal predicates in Russian nullify this or the facts
regarding "subjects", "objects", and "verbs" found in Comrie (1985)?

Anyway, any thoughts or references would be appreciated.

Thanks again,
Shannon