Re: [PEIRCE-L] material relevant to Peircean linguistics

Sat, 28 Nov 2015 10:00:12 -0800

Edwina - It doesn't fit into the Peircean concept of semeiosis because it's arbitrary. There's no way in that conception for accounting how speech is related to rules of grammar except by linguists' fiat. Chomsky also has no way of accounting for linguistic history. Why should "infrastructure" (by which I take it you mean "deep structure") ever change?

What you call "verbal superstructure" EVOLVES IN TANDEM WITH "logical infrastructure." There is a set of patterned relationships between these two aspects of linguistic structure that are diagrammatic, and the telos of all language change is toward ever-greater diagrammatization of meaning in form.

Hope this helps eliminate the problems you speak about.

Michael

-----Original Message-----
From: Edwina Taborsky
Sent: Nov 28, 2015 12:03 PM
To: Michael Shapiro , CSP
Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] material relevant to Peircean linguistics


Michael - I don't see why Chomsky's linguistic analysis doesn't fit into Peircean semiosis. After all, the underlying grammatical infrastructural capacity can be argued as Thirdness, and for Peirce, Thirdness is evolutionary.
 
And after all, is it the logical infrastructure of language that evolves, or is it the verbal superstructure, so to speak?  I'd have a problem with considering that the logical infrastructure evolves, but linguistic _expression_ does (eg, Breal, M - and I'm sure you know his work)..
 
Edwina
----- Original Message -----
To: CSP
Sent: Saturday, November 28, 2015 6:45 AM
Subject: [PEIRCE-L] material relevant to Peircean linguistics

List,

Ben Udell and Gary Richmond have suggested that I occasionally post material on the use of Peirce's whole philosophy for the founding of a new linguistics. Here is the first installment. (Glosses are supplied in order to aid comprehension by readers whose first language is other than English.)

Semeiotic Neostructuralism and Language

 

GLOSSARY

 

bootless, adj.: to no advantage or avail

cortex, n.: outer layer of neural tissue in humans and other mammals

diagram, n.: a type of sign in which relations at one level (form) are replicated at another level (meaning)

diagrammatization, n. < diagrammatize, v.: make (into) a diagram (of)

fortuitous, adj.: occurring by chance without evident causal need or relation or without deliberate intention

nota bene: mark well (Latin); used to call attention to something important

paradigm, n.: a philosophical and theoretical framework of a scientific school or discipline within which      theories, laws, and generalizations and the experiments performed in support of them are formulated; broadly: a philosophical or theoretical framework of any kind

phenomenalist, n. > phenomenalism, n.: a mode of thought which considers things from a  phenomenal viewpoint, or as phenomena only; the metaphysical theory or belief  that (actual or possible) phenomena are the only objects of knowledge, or the only realities; also: spec. the theory that statements about physical objects can be analysed in terms of, or reduced to, statements about (actual or possible) sensory             experiences and their contents

pleonasm, n.: iteration or repetition in speaking or in writing; the use of more words than those necessary to denote mere sense (as the man he said, saw with his own eyes, true fact); esp. the coincident use of a word and its substitute for the same grammatical function

postbiotic, adj.: pertaining to the period following the appearance of life

pragmaticism, n.: the pragmatic philosophy of C. S. Peirce

semeiotic, adj. < semeiosis, n.: the process whereby something functions as a sign

teleology, n.: a metaphysical doctrine explaining phenomena and events by final causes

vignette, n.: a short literary sketch chiefly descriptive and characterized usually by delicacy, wit, and subtlety             

 

 

            Readers of this book [The Speaking Self: Language Lore and English Usage, 2nd ed., in preparation] who have an interest in the conceptual underpinnings of its vignettes may benefit from being reminded of some of the main points in which the doctrine christened “semeiotic neostructuralism” (in the spirit of C. S. Peirce’s pragmaticism) by the author differs fundamentally from the dominant paradigm of contemporary linguistics, which is nominally identified with Chomsky and his followers––regardless, nota bene, whether these latter-day practitioners have renamed their particular enterprise (e. g., “Optimality Theory” or “Cognitive Linguistics;” ALL linguistics is necessarily ‘cognitive’, hence CL is a flagrant pleonasm) so as to differentiate it from what was originally called “tranformational” or “generative” grammar.

            Chomsky has a rather mechanistic/mechanicalist view of language, for all that he understands that the freedom to compose sentences that are original, unpredictable, and yet intelligible is different from the unoriginal, predictable products of strictly mechanical  action. His view is mechanistic nonetheless because he simply posits underlying structures by which sentences are to be generated. Possibly in a wider perspective, Chomsky is no more reductively mechanistic than a semeiotic neostructuralist, in a wider perspective, is a phenomenalist. For he no doubt admits (or would admit) that the linguistic universals in our brains are not just there, period, but evolved, with the brain’s evolution, as chance variants that were ‘selected’ by the principle of reproductive success. Similarly, the intentions or needs or felt urgencies to speak or to achieve certain outcomes might explain––but only in a context wider than Chomskyan linguistics––why language’s generative mechanisms are used in this way rather than in that.

            But if we focus simply on the linguist’s study, as diversely conceived by Chomsky and the semeiotic neostructuralist, then there is this difference: for the one, the teleology of language is excluded from linguistic explanation, while for the other it is the very stuff of explanation. For the one, linguistic phenomena conform to a describable structure of highly abstract laws, while for the other linguistic phenomena exhibit an intelligible if less abstract, more complicated structure. For the one, the system is a given, and any changes in it are accidental, while for the other development is essential to language––development is more the reality than is any one system of  rules––and that development is also intelligible and not merely given.

            That is the conflict. The reason the semeiotic neostructuralist approach is, if it is successful, superior is that it can be used to explain the very evolution of the brain-mechanism or linguistic capacities and universals that Chomsky can at best describe. That is, given creatures somewhat sociable, exchanging  signs as their way of life, then the survival value of their communicating more elaborate and precise diagrams would explain the retention of those fortuitous variations, say, in brain structure that promote exactly such powers of expressible diagrammatization. That is, the principle of this evolution will be itself linguistic, and continuous with the principles of postbiotic, strictly linguistic evolution.

            The thought here is not unlike that which refuses to postulate linguistic intentions separate from the capacity to exercise those intentions. Just as there could be no desire to speak without an ability to speak, so also there could be no evolution of linguistic capacities––even, or especially, at the physiological level––except among those who, already speaking to one another, will more likely survive as a species if they speak more effectively. Thus, instead of a neurophysiological explanation of language, we have a linguistic explanation of the higher cortex––and probably not just the speech centers either, since so many of our capacities for sensation and action would be bootless without our capacities for speech.

 



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