Abstract
Words come into existence through a number of distinct processes including naming, semantic shifts, morphological productivity, and compounding. In accounting for the instantiation and individuation of word-types, two diachronic proposals termed Originalism and History are considered, which view word-types as emerging through a tokening act after which they are subsequently distinguished from others on the basis of having a unique event-like origin. In the following paper I elucidate two central tenets of Originalism and History, which I name essentialism and propagation. Next, I demonstrate that each suffer considerable challenges from evidence pertaining to the systematic generativity of words grounded in universal features of human lexical cognition. A third diachronic theory named Originalism-Plus-Transfer (OPT) is then outlined. I argue that this more nuanced version of Originalism, in its present form, still lacks a thorough explanation of pivotal features of word generativity, word instantiation, and word individuation. A number of ‘synchronic’ constraints on word-hood—phonological, phonotactic, morpho-syntactic, and semantic—are put forward to ground the possible space for word generation. I conclude by exploring the viability of supplementing OPT with synchronic constraints and propose that a union between the two has the potential to provide OPT with greater empirical strength and predictive power. The upshot of this analysis is that there exists great programmatic value for diachronic theories in drawing on synchronic data and that the latter must feature as central to the philosophy of words if such work is to anticipate achieving explanatory adequacy.
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Notes
I will use the term ‘event’ broadly to cover a range of potential interpretations. Sainsbury (2015) opts for the word ‘act’ instead suggesting that a single event may contain several originating acts. I leave open the question of whether a mind-internal event (act) of origination would qualify. In the foregoing, whenever I use the term ‘event’ I do so without explicit commitment to any ontology of events or acts.
The distinction here is of critical importance and may be likened to that between externalist and internalist conceptions of language. In rejecting a structural–functional conception of words—a conception defined through orthogonal, articulatory, semantic, morpho-syntactic properties, or any set thereof—it is natural to treat the view as opposed to an internalist and individualist theory, which is favoured in generative grammar (Chomsky, 2000). I opt to largely avoid the external/internal terminology in favour of a distinction between diachronic and synchronic explanation, although I believe there is substantial overlap.
The metaphysical landscape for this debate is succinctly outlined in Miller (2021), within which Originalism would be categorized as a non-platonic type-realist position. Through Miller’s analysis it would be reasonable to suppose further that Originalism and History are committed to a ‘substance assumption’, with words taking the ontological category of being ‘concrete particulars’ (2021, pp. 5732–5734).
The intuitive force of the problem holds even if there is only one possible counterexample. Gasparri uses the example of the word ‘pasteurize’ to illustrate the intuition: “we regard as truisms the following two statements: (a) the word ‘pasteurize’ might have been introduced in English n years after 1881 if Pasteur’s germ theory and the process of heating liquids to eliminate pathogenic microbes had been popularized n years later than they actually were; (b) had that happened, the introduced word type would have been the same word ‘pasteurize’ we are familiar with” (2016, p. 127).
Irmak takes words to be temporal abstracta, meaning that they are ‘temporal’, ‘nonspatial’, ‘repeatable’, and ‘contingent’ entities (2019, p. 1147). This might mark a small divergence from Originalism regarding the ontological category of words.
In History, the condition would be asymmetric in that whilst all word-types demand a unique originating event, it does not follow that a unique originating event always instantiates a unique word-type. The core of essentialism is still retained, however.
This example is found at the start of Uriagereka’s Syntactic Anchors (2009).
It is difficult to see how this could be classified as a mistake as there is no pre-existing correct form for the word, unlike something such as *un-valid vs. invalid, where the former is incorrect.
I do not wish to say that word propagation in a linguistic community plays no role at all in word instantiation or individuation, but rather that it is not a suitable explanatory route for word instantiation as it is neither necessary nor sufficient for word-hood.
For example, Wukchumni, which is a native American language found in California, has only one remaining fluent speaker (Vaughen-Lee, 2014). Would that speaker alone constitute a linguistic community?
This observation is what partially grounds the I-language, ‘I’ for internalist/individualist, perspective (Chomsky, 2000).
OPT also denies an explanatory role to both speaker’s intentions and tolerance regarding articulation (or orthography) in judging whether two utterance tokens are of the same word. Speaker’s intentions and articulation tolerance are frequent features of theories in word instantiation and individuation. Certain authors take speaker’s intentions in forming an utterance to be necessary, sufficient, or both for successfully tokening a word (Kaplan, 1990, 2011). In its strongest form this reliance on speaker’s intentions has been termed an “intentional theory of words” (Cappelen, 1999). OPT resists the idea that intentions are sufficient, or even necessary, for an utterance to token a word. Regarding tolerance, Irmak’s History explicitly states that consideration of similarity and difference will be criterial in assessing word identification (2019, p. 1151). Tolerance itself is understood to be a standard that helps to govern whether an utterance successfully tokens a particular word, it helps to distinguish a “nonperformance” from “merely a bad one” (Hawthorne & Lepore, 2011, p. 462). There is room for variation between distinct utterances that token the same word W, but there must also be limits as to what the linguistic community can reasonably determine to count as a valid utterance of W. This is the appeal to tolerance deployed in most versions of Originalism and History regarding word identification, but it is likewise resisted by OPT.
The word un-turnaround is not currently one that has become conventionalized in the English language. In OPT there is nothing in principle to stop this situation from arising, in which case a new neologizing event would be established through the coining of a convention for a larger linguistic community.
In using the phrase ‘word-types’ I do not intend to imply an ontological commitment to types. If we wish to entirely sidestep ‘type-talk’, then the same claim can readily be rephrased as stating that certain words cannot be tokened in any language. I expand on this in fn. 16 following the first specification of the phonological and phonotactic constraints.
Harris defines multiple exponence as follows, “[m]ultiple (or extended) exponence is the occurrence of multiple realizations of a single morphosemantic feature, bundle of features, or derivational category within a word” (2017, p. 9).
The proposed constraints on their own are not intended as a case of “ontologically committing type-talk” regarding words (Miller, 2020, pp. 6–7). At present, the synchronic proposal should, if necessary, be consistent with a nominalist ontology of words. I believe that this remains the case if the proposal acts as a supplement to OPT, which is designed to account for the individuation of word tokens. The ongoing talk of word instantiation should not be confused as defending ontologically significant word-types, for word instantiation remains necessary within a nominalist theory of words.
Interestingly, the fact that all the sentences in (9a) are grammatical further highlights the inability of propagation to act as a necessary or sufficient condition for word-hood. If Messied and Messiesque are both words, which I claim they are, then their lack of frequency in the English corpus suggests that conditions for word instantiation are less social than Originalism and History would suppose.
Possible exceptions to this include sentences such as my cat is a she, or names including the English post-punk band The The. However, these examples form only a minute set of data.
The use of the term ‘impossible words’ refers to what is precluded from the space of possible words by the universal constraints S and a subset of constraints SL, rather than a claim regarding a metaphysics of impossible words.
The term feature bundle is from Boeckx (2008, p. 63). It refers to the set of phonological, semantic, and potentially morpho-syntactic features that words have as members of the lexicon. Precisely which features are lexicalized is an empirical question.
There is also a challenge regarding how to reconcile the idea that argument structure is lexicalized (a consequence of the impossible words argument) with a structure-less conception of how substantive vocabulary is stored in the lexicon, as entailed in the morphology literature just discussed. This tension will need to be put to one side for the purpose of this paper as it would take us too far afield from the issues under consideration. For an overview of available options see Alexiadou et al. (2014, p. 5).
For instance, a new word xyz could be instantiated and be used in the sentence Florence wants to xyz her car. It could mean something stipulated such as ‘modify the car so as to improve aerodynamics’, but the linguistic convention would need to be coined with relevant uptake in the community. The possibility of the word’s instantiation must still adhere to Constraints P and S, in conjunction with a requirement to coin a new linguistic convention.
It remains possible for an Originalist to take some words to be introduced internally, or to be considered uninstantiated words where instantiation requires an external tokening event. OPT is aware of the possibility of unperformed words and does note that “neologizing needn’t be a performance” as it is permissible to coin a word through description alone (Stojnić, 2021, p. 14, fn. 36). That said, this commitment is not without opposition (Miller, 2022).
This topic has long been under investigation in linguistics (Borer, 2005, 2008, 2013; Di Sciullo & Williams, 1987; Hale, 1962; Harris, 2002; Julien, 2002; Marantz, 1997, 2000; Ramchand, 2008; and references therein). The upshot of this work may come at the expense of our common-sense notion of what constitutes a ‘word’ as employed in philosophy of language. It has been noted since at least Di Sciullo & Williams that standard definitions of words fail (1987). According to Di Sciullo & Williams the three standard definitions—words are associated with listedness, words are morphological objects, or words as syntactic atoms—all have counterexamples. The debate has continued since then with a healthy dose of skepticism regarding the place that words play in linguistic theory, leading some to deem words to be “epiphenomenon” and not, as commonly assumed, the “basic units” that act as input to the morpho-syntactic system (Julien, 2002, p. 321).
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Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Alexei Procyshyn, J. T. M. Miller, Benjamin Barber, and two anonymous reviewers for many helpful comments.
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Hughes, T.J. Possible words: generativity, instantiation, and individuation. Synthese 202, 207 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04428-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04428-4