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113 II The Salience of Words and Our Adventurousness in Using Them Section 1. Words and Basic Lexical Factors (a) The strategic situation of words or expressions of comparable rank (i) Words as the loci of stability within languages and as roots of linguistic creativity Units of different “rank”, in the way that “narrative”, “argument”, “conversation ”, and “exchange” signify units of discourse of higher rank than “sentence ” and “utterance”, need to be distinguished in analyzing parole. Below the sentence, common idiom reckons the “subsentential clause”, the “phrase”, and the “word” as entering into speech as significant constituents of three successively lower ranks, while such word-formatives or “morphemes” as “cow-” and “-s” in the word “cows” and “kick-” and “-ed” in the word “kicked”, or, in a different way, the “un-” with “-accept-” and “-able” in the word “unacceptable”, are constituents of lower rank. (Phonological and graphological ideas such as “syllable”, “consonant”, “vowel”, “phoneme”, “character”, and “letter” have no semantic or lexical standing, and stand outside this classification.) In chapter III, I establish that entities of the rank of sentence, such as statements, commands, and wishes, have their primary place in linguistics at the level of parole, whatever the medium—speech, writing, or sign-language. Yet it is elements at the rank of word and morpheme which introduce content into our discourse. And this requires these elements to have a double place, at the level of langue as well as the level of parole. In any utterance there 114   Words and Their Dynamism are typically at least two such expressions, articulated together, and it is these expressions which, in the context of utterance, give content to the utterances in which they occur. It is these content-introducing expressions which constitute at the same time the loci of stability, the vehicles of expressiveness, and the roots of language’s openness to creative use. It is striking that, while to philosopher, linguist, and psychologist sentences are often taken as the basic empirical data, to the ordinary person it is words and morphemes which stand out. They recur in many different utterances , sometimes in liaison, sometimes elided, in varied dialect forms and even in different languages, in many forms, singular and plural, in varied tense, sometimes used literally and sometimes metaphorically.1 Thus it is of the essence of the word or morpheme—in general of the lexical factor—to be recognized under many garbs, phonemic, grammatical, and semantic. In the introduction and in chapter I, I portrayed this informality and flexibility in the use of words, successfully communicating meaning to our hearers as the chief root of the capacity of the language-user to make “infinite use of finite means” in speech, enabling us to express fresh ways of thinking and deal with unanticipated problems and kinds of situation. (ii) The need for a conception of “lexical factor” wider than “the word” The attempt to identify words or lexical factors reveals many ambiguities. We can form a concept of “word-form”, defined as a unitary stretch within sentences which cannot be internally rearranged or suffer internal insertions and which remains stable in form while appearing in different verbal contexts, thus defining it distributionally. Here, as Gabriël Nuchelmans observes, we need to give priority to grammatical over phonological features in defining words,2 as is evident from the phenomena of liaison and elision as well as of slovenliness of speech and acceptable variations in pronunciation. However, besides the concept of word-form, we need a concept of “lexeme”, linguistic sign, or “lexical factor” wider than that of the word in order to cope with the phenomena of inflection and agglutination. In traditional presentations of the grammars of inflected languages, verbs and nouns as lexemes—the verb amo or the noun mensa—are conceived as occurring in word-forms specified in 1. Cf. Dwight Bolinger, “The Uniqueness of the Word”, Lingua 12 (1963): 113–36, who draws on the ideas of Reichling, the latter influenced by Karl Bühler. None follow Bloomfield’s concentration on the morpheme . 2. Gabriël Nuchelmans, “Review Article: R. H. Robins, General Linguistics”, Lingua 16 (1966): 406–9. Strictly speaking the word “phonological” is preferable to the word “phonetic”, since what is concerned is not just the acoustic sound, but complexes of phonemes as items functional within the particular language concerned—counting as the same even if pronounced indistinctly. Sound distinctions may be significant in one dialect or language, but not another. [18.218.184.214] Project MUSE...

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