Re: Tlvn, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

At 4:37 PM -0400 9/14/99, Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
>(I've quite forgotten what exactly this thread was about,
It started with the old chesnut of verb-only or noun-only languages. (No
one mentioned Tom O'Breton's ALLNOUN, I don't think). The valid point was
raised that any such language would still have to cover the same semantic
ground if it was to be useful, and the claim was made that all-noun-ism or
all-verb-ism must be impossible.

The reply was that noun and verb are syntactic categories, and that a
syntactic distinction can be eliminated without neceaarily imporverishing
the semantics. I consider "adjectival words" to be a typical case, as
langauges can have a separate syntactic category like many European
languages, or express these functions by nominal _or_ verbal roots.

Thus the semantic function of expressing qualities of objects can be
expressed by several syntactic functions in different languages.

We _need_ not draw a distinction between syntax and semantics, but in fact,
such a distinction has explanatory power in discussing and examining the
similarities that we do in fact notice across languages. This need not be a
"watertight" distinction like the one the early structuralists claimed to
make (though they were far too sophisticated to let it get in the way of
their actual work). Subsequent schools (including the generativists, to
whom I am not very sympathetic) are also criticised on these same grounds
by some.

Without being dogmatic, it's productive to make a distinction between
syntax and semantics, even though they are not independent (how could they
be? The syntax exists to express the semantics, which is the goal of the
process.

For computer geeks, the distinction between lexical and grammatical
analysis of programming languages is somewhat analogous. These are not
always completely independent (esp. in the monstrous C++, but even in
Java), and the distinction is theoretically unnecessary (since the set of
legal programs is the same however you describe the grammar). Yet, it's
meaningful and useful to make this split.

>but
>tangentially to other posts: anyone who wants to neatly divide syntax
>and semantics into two separate water-tight compartments might take a
>look at Wierzbicka's _The Semantics of Grammar_. If there's a grammatical
>distinction in a language, it will in all probability exist to encode a
>meaning, is her contention, and the different grammatical distinctions
>are not divided equally in different languages. She's Polish/Australian,
>by the way.)
This point is a good one, but doesn't actually address the utility of a
two-level analysis. Phenomena at the syntactic level are meaningful at the
semantic level. However some things, like syntactic agreement rules, or
gender systems, have only loose, undependable reflexes in semantics, while
they exhibit strong regularity at the syntactic level. Most of the details
of agreement and government phenomena can be explained very well at the
syntactic level (in terms of word classes, etc.), and not so well at the
semantic level (in terms of semantic categories).

  -- David
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