Cladistic language concepts

[John Hewson]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
On Mon, 14 Sep 1998, Roger Wright wrote:
 
>         The great value of these interesting discussions has been
> in the demonstration that the two fields are not identical, and that the
> analogies from biology are only helpful if we don't take them too
> seriously.
>         It's time to do the same with the pervasive analogy from the
> construction industry, isn't it, and accept that languages aren't really
> "structures" at all, however helpful that analogy once was ...
 
Agreed. Structures are entities that are created from parts that fit
together, parts that may have varying degrees of pre-fabrication. A
shelter in the woods has to be made from raw materials, whereas a house
includes all kinds of paradigmatic elements such as doors, windows, sinks,
bricks, 2 x 4's, shingles, etc.
 
Sentences are structures, and some languages have more pre-fabrication of
sentence elements than others.
 
The definition of a language as a set of sentences, which Bloomfield took
from the early Wittgenstein (in the _Tractatus_ (1919), heading 4.001) and
included in his 1926 `Set of Postulates', is demonstrably false: no child
learning a language learns a set of sentences. In fact languages don't
have sentences as Saussure pointed out long ago (CLG p.172: "la phrase ...
appartient a la parole, non a la langue"). Bloomfield's definition is
continued in Chomsky's work. Originally it was Chomsky's only definition
of a language (Syntactic Structures p.13); today the set of sentences
(utterances, actually, in Bloomfield) is Chomsky's E-language.
 
We use our languages, with all their paradigmatic possibilities, to create
sentences. A language has permanence, whereas a sentence does not.
 
The Prague School, and also Meillet, both influenced by Saussure, defined
a language as a system of systems. It was the definition that Jakobson
used throughout his lifetime. It would be interesting to determine what is
the difference between a system and a structure. JH
 
 
 
John Hewson, FRSC                               tel: (709)737-8131
University Research Professor                   fax: (709)737-4000
Memorial University of Newfoundland
St. John's NF, CANADA A1B 3X9