1. Introduction
We are going to show that linguistic information has a mainly unobservable component in speech, which cannot be noticed as semantic information, that is, is nonsemantic and denotes nothing. The unobservable nonsemantic component is an important characteristic of speech: It underlies the grammar. The area of study we are going to present encompasses grammatical facts and, accordingly, could be pertained to grammar. However, we study not grammatical phenomena represented in grammatical forms but linguistic information detached from the form. We don’t turn to a new field of linguistics, but we do turn to a new level of analysis. This analysis describes linguistic information on a level deeper than the traditional grammar but less detailed 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 what the denoted things are, 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 nonsemantic 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 level of grammatical study has no background in existing branches of linguistics but appears to serve itself as a background, a foundation of grammar. This level of analysis was not studied earlier. That’s why the references in the paper don’t reveal its content and concern only particular cases.
The distinctiveness of this approach is that in describing linguistic information it is not the word and structure meanings or sentence significance (construction semantics is further discussed in this section) that we analyze but a nonsemantic component of them. This component is semantic information parameters formed by bits of nonsemantic information. These parameters are not initially embedded in word meanings but join the meanings used in speech. Unlike the observed parameters of physical objects, the semantic information parametersdo not represent the meaning’s content, its quantity. They are just tags that provide a link of one meaning’s parameters to the parameters of another available meaning and thereby a link between the meanings. But by linking meaning parameters, sentence grammar is seen as a unified whole formed on a common ground.
In this paper, we want to show what the level of nonsemantic information is and give some of the results of its analysis. First, we are going to show what elements form this level. Then, we will give arguments in favor of the validity of studying information separate from linguistic forms and point out various ways of how nonsemantic information parameters are used. Finally, we will give arguments for the semantic information parameters existence.
So, this paper suggests and substantiates the hypothesis that semantic information in speech has a nonsemantic component that distinguishes speech as language in use from language as list of linguistic tools (that is, a staticly organized repository of everything that is necessary for producing speech and can be represented in it). Nonsemantic by itself, the studied level can be, for the most part, revealed by means of a disclosure we call linguistic reading. Thus, in this paper we analyse nonsemantic parameters and their role in forming sentence information.
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 is, in our view, to show differences of methods and objects of study between our research and other methods 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: “La première articulation du langage est celle selon laquelle tout fait d’expérience à transmettre, tout besoin qu’on désire faire connaître à autrui s’analysent en une suite d’unités douées chacune d’une forme vocale et d’un sens” (13) [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]. The “monème” is a minimal sign which «ne saurait être analysé en une succession de signes” (15) [cannot be analyzed in a sequence of signs]. Thus, André 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: “les signes acoustiques ne disposent que de la ligne du temps; leurs éléments se présentent l’un après l’autre; ils forment une chaîne” [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. A speaker articulates his/her thought using successively emerging signs. A required condition to understand it is mapping sound forms to a content more or less identical for both speaker and addressee. A listening addressee hears the speech as an increasing by every sign speech segment subjected to understanding. The addressee gets a partial understanding of speech as it gradually develops in attempting preliminary guessing of the meaning of the sentence while anticipating the resulting construction completion for full understanding the sentence.
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 operated from quite different angles. Loet Leydesdorff (2016) mentions that “As is well known, Shannon [Shannon, C. E. 1948. A Mathematical Theory of Communication. Bell System Technical Journal, 27, 379-423 and 623-656] 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 [Hayles, N. K. 1990. Chaos Bound; Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science Ithaca, etc.: Cornell University, p. 59]. … 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 [Luhmann, N. 1995. Social Systems. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, p. 67] 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) – objectiveinformation is converted into (inter)-subjective meaningthrough 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 meaning from the word in speech (see further next paragraph): The meaning detached from the word ceases to be meaning but remains information. It is also necessary to draw a 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’s 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 object of study. In contrast to them, the proposed approach deals with nonsemantic entities. But it can’t be defined as a formal system either because, although the nonsemantic entities don’t refer to the meaning of the words11See Rudolf Carnap’s (1937: 1) definition of a formal theory: A theory, a rule, a definition, or the like is to be calledformal systems when no reference is made in it either to the meaning of the symbols (for example, the words) or to the sense of the expressions (e.g., the sentences), but simply and solely to the kinds and order of the symbols from which the expressions are constructed. , they 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 (see below) 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 available meanings interact in speech through parametric characteristics and not how a meaning correlates with other meanings or knowledge.