1 Introduction
How do speech grammaticality and semantics correlate? Are these two
autonomous systems or is grammar necessarily tied to lexical units that
serve as a support for syntactic constructions (what is assumed by or
underlies existing theories)? The article substantiates the existence of
an autonomous mechanism underlying the grammatical correctness of a
sentence.
Let us turn to such a class of units as interjections. Interjections are
meant for a compact expression (but not denotation) of emotions,
feelings or reactions to the surrounding reality. Like any sign, they
have a recognizable conventional meaning, but less ”precise” compared to
words that have a constant denotative meaning. Speaking of
interjections, David P. Wilkins (1992) notes that “their interpretation
is largely dependent on the time and place at which they are uttered. In
linguistics, interjections can also be considered a form of deixis”
(125). And further: their “referent changes, dependent on the context
of the utterance” (142). The subject I considers himself an
unchanging reference point in changing space and time, and at the same
time, he develops, towards the objects of all information that comes to
him, his attitude in the form of emotions, feelings and assessments.
Thus, the subject who is implementing a chronotopic deixis, while
observing what is objectively happening outside his Self, expresses his
evaluation attitude to what is happening, making decisions in accordance
with it. This state of affairs is reflected in the existence in speech
of the corresponding units – interjections. This class of units in
whose meaning emotions starting from the subject and the deixis oriented
towards him are combined is considered universal. “It is perhaps true
that apart from nouns and verbs, interjections… are another word
class found in all languages. … Indeed, as Schachter rightly
observes: ʻAlthough there are a good many linguistic descriptions that
fail to mention interjections, it seems likely that all languages do in
fact have such a class of wordsʼ ” (Ameka 1992: 101). The fact that the
class of interjections as well as the classes of nouns and verbs are
universal leads to the idea of genesis of these three classes within the
same mechanism. The simplest mechanism explaining their genesis is, as
we found, two coupled operations, which we present below and show what
elements they consist of. These elements do not manifest themselves. It
means that these elements represent non-semantic information bits, which
are unsigned, i.e., lack a sign, and denote nothing, and therefore are
not noted by researchers. But at the same time, they form structures
that provide, as we are going to show, the existence of the three word
classes and grammaticality of speech by establishing a link between word
meanings. In no other way do these operational structures affect
word meanings. The causation of sentence grammar with operational
structures enables us to answer positively the question of grammatical
autonomy.
If operational structures are unsigned and non-semantic, then how can
one know they exist and how can one reveal their existence? If one can
show that operational structures determine the belonging of every word
to a class, being connected to word’s meaning, and above that create a
mechanism for word syntactic connection, it will be convincing evidence
of their presence in speech. In addition, we will show a technic for
revealing operational structures covertly functioning in speech.
The area of study we are going to present encompasses grammatical facts.
However, in accordance with our task, we will analyze lexical meanings
only from the point of view of the effect on them of the operational
structures, which accompany them as a non-semantic component, and not
from the view of their connection with grammatical forms. In this sense,
we will say that we study linguistic information in isolation from
grammatical forms. So, we don’t turn to a new field of linguistics, but
we do turn to a new aspect of analysis. This analysis describes
linguistic information with more details than the traditional grammar
but differently than the fields relying on semantics. Let us take, for
instance, the sentences
(1) (a) A ball rolls.
(b) The man stands like a kouros.
(c) Two and two make five.
(d) I apologize for my behaviour.
(British National Corpus 2014). All the sentences have the same subject
and verb structure from the point of view of traditional grammar. If we
take into consideration denotative meaning, we will see the difference
between the sentences: The sentence (c) is false, (d) is a performative
utterance, (b) contains a stative verb unlike (a), which contains an
action verb. Just as the traditional grammar, the non-semantic component
analysis shows no difference between them. But this analysis identifies,
for example, three types of sentences with a direct object (they are
cited in the Section 6), while the traditional grammar doesn’t
distinguish them, and they have no semantic basis for classification.
The discovered aspect of grammatical study has no background in existing
branches of linguistics but appears to serve itself as a background, a
foundation of grammar. This aspect of analysis was not studied earlier.
That’s why the references in the paper don’t reveal its content and
concern only particular cases.
Word classes are uniquely determined only in speech. By speech we mean a
language in verbal communication opposed to the language in the narrow
sense, “Langue” (a staticly organized repository of everything that is
necessary for producing speech and can be represented in it). As the
effect of operational structures connected to the word meanings can only
be detected in speech, of what we will say next, we accept that
operational structures are also connected to word meanings in speech.
The benefit of this approach is that sentence grammar is seen as a
unified whole formed on a common foundation. In this paper, we consider,
first, the coupled operations and the elements of which they are
composed. Then we will present the structures formed from these elements
and consider their role in the sentence. Finally, we will demonstrate a
method for revealing operational structures functioning in a sentence.
To determine the place of this research among the areas of academic
context is a difficult task. We inevitably deal with phenomena being
under study in other areas. However, none of those areas provides a
theory that might be a starting point for this research and none
contains a combined research base on which it could rely. The best way
to present the place of this study is, in our view, to show its
difference from the research areas whose object we deal with. To do
that, we must clarify the following notions: sign and its relation to
meaning in speech; meaning vs. information.
There are different approaches on sign and its relation to meaning in
speech. Wallace Chafe (2018) considers the relation between sign and
meaning, first of all, for the speaker from a whole thought to overt
phonology via a semantic structure: “… organizing thoughts and
pairing them with sounds defines what language is (27). One can validly
object that this figure [thoughts → sounds] ignores a listener’s
task of moving from sounds back to thoughts, but understanding language
depends on having something to understand in the first place” (28).
“The process [“verbalization”] is set in motion by a thought”
(30). The next stage is semantic structuring of thought, then it is a
syntactic structure, which is symbolized by an abstract phonological
structure, then it is overt phonology, “which then provides the input
to sound” (30). André Martinet (1967) suggests the following
segmentation of language: “The first articulation of language is that
according to which any experience to be transmitted, any need that one
wishes to make known to others, are analyzed in a series of units each
endowed with a vocal form and a sense” (13). The “monème” is a
minimal sign which “cannot be analyzed in a sequence of signs” (15).
Thus, A. Martinet talks about a sequence of units, so that the sequence
itself as well as its smaller components have a sound form and a sense.
Ray Jackendoff (2010) considers the interface between levels of mental
representation: “In the Parallel Architecture, the combinatorial
properties of meaning are not derived from syntax; they arise from
autonomous conceptual combinatoriality. … Part of the mapping
[between meaning and sound (in either direction)] is provided by the
words, which are interface rules between small-scale pieces of meaning
and sound. The remaining part of the mapping is the encoding of the
semantic relations among the words: the function-argument,
head-modifier, and binding relations” (20). So, R. Jackendoff sees two
modes of mapping between meaning and sound: pieces of meaning and sound
in words, and semantic relations and sound above the words. To express
our view on sign and its relation to meaning in speech, let us cite
Ferdinand de Saussure’s well-known statement: “The acoustic signs have
only the time line; their elements appear one after the other; they form
a chain” (103). Given the views above, we can say that speech develops
gradually being built up with signs, that is, units endowed with a
sense. The speaker articulates his/her thought using successively
emerging signs. A required condition to understand it is sharing sound
forms and meanings theoretically identical for both speaker and
addressee. A listener hears speech segments increasing sign by sign and
gets a partial understanding of speech as it gradually develops in
figuring out the upcoming sentence meaning and anticipating it.
In constructional semantics as Ada Rohde (2001) says, “In general,
constructions are seen as form-meaning pairings that link a specific
syntactic structure to abstract meaning components. Constructions are
thus not different in kind from lexical items, they are simply more
abstract representations. … One of the defining properties of
constructions is that their meaning is not entirely predictable from
their component parts. Strict compositionality is thus excluded by
definition” (37). Thomas Hoffmann and Graeme Trousdale (2013) notice
that “… the analysis of syntactic structures as form-meaning pairings
was commonplace in traditional grammars. … Consequently, he [Paul
Kay] makes a distinction between constructions as fully productive
processes that are part of a speaker’s grammar, on the one hand (such as
the All-cleft construction), and semiregular processes such as the ’A as
NP’-pattern (as exemplified by dumb as an ox, dead as a doornail, or
green as grass), on the other, which he sees as mere patterns of coining
(and which are part of metagrammar, i.e. ”a compendium of useful
statements about the grammar”).” In this regard, let us note for now
that when meanings enter a construction in speech, not only meanings but
also semantic information is involved (see also R. Jackendoff above).
The relation of information and meaning is defined from quite different
angles. Loet Leydesdorff (2016) mentions that “As is well known,
Shannon first focused on information that was not (yet) meaningful:
ʻFrequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are
correlated to some system with certain physical or conceptual entitiesʼ
(3). … one can distinguish between “meaningful information” —
potentially reducing uncertainty — and Shannon-type information that
is by definition equal to uncertainty. … Meaning is provided to
the information from the perspective of hindsight (of the “later
event” — that is, a system of reference) (4). On the one hand,
Luhmann defined information as a selective operation and stated that
“all information has meaning. (15)” “As will be shown in the
following definitions of information concerning Wiener and Shannon,”
writes Kane X. Faucher (2013), “none of these have anything to do with
knowledge claims and or semantic meaning; they are largely mathematical
concepts. … information is made material when incarnated
in artefacts, objects, and entities. In this way, information is what
“haunts” matter, while depending on it (8).” According to John
Mingers (1995) “… meaning is created from the information
carried by signs . The consequences are that information is objective,
but ultimately inaccessible to humans, who exclusively inhabit a world
of meaning. Meaning is essentially intersubjective – that is, it
is based on a shared consensual understanding (3). This explanation
reveals the relationship between information and meaning (import) –
objective information is converted into (inter)-subjectivemeaning through a process of digitalization (11). Information is
an objective, although abstract, feature of the world in the same way as
are physical objects and their properties (12)”. Our own understanding
is different from the cited ones. The choice of our notion of linguistic
information is based upon the phenomenon of disconnecting meaningы from
the wordы in speech (see the next paragraph): We believe that the
meaning of a word becomes information only in this case. We also take
into account the distinction between meaning as a means of identifying
(the denoting property is a characteristic not of a word as pure form
but of its meaning – it is meaning that enables naming), which we can
call semantic information, and meaning as a subject of study. Semantic
information turns to external reality and is connected with our
knowledge of the world we live in, whereas in analyzing meaning as
subject of study we must reveal its own characteristics and not what it
denotes.
Finally, we would like to notice some important distinctions of the
proposed approach from the available linguistics studies. This research
is not part of traditional grammar, but it is also distinct from modern
theoretical grammar in the object of study. In contrast to them, the
proposed approach deals with non-semantic entities. This approach can’t
be defined as a formal system either because these entities are embedded
in linguistic information. In Cognitive Linguistics, as Fauconnier
(2014: 2) says, “Cognitive capacities that play a fundamental role in
the organization of language are not specific to language”. Regardless
of the Cognitive Linguistics findings, the studied level formed with
operational structures is specific to speech process. In Cognitive
Linguistics, as Geeraerts and Cuyckens (2007: 5) say, “Language is seen
as a repository of world knowledge, a structured collection of
meaningful categories that help us deal with new experiences and store
information about old ones”. What interests us here, is just how the
utilized meanings interact in speech through non-semantic
characteristics and not how a meaning correlates with other meanings or
knowledge.