Abstract
The sections of this chapter were each intended to be their own chapters in a much larger volume focussed on Caldwell’s theory of Molecular Sememics, and he begins by presenting his motivation for the theory. It has the potential for explaining many facts about language, which, when taken together, are difficult to explain consistently within the current orthodoxies of linguistic study. Caldwell stresses that such an explanation can be found by focussing on parole and not langue, for language is more like a biological process, and not like a computational system as standard theory suggests.
The second section provides the context for understanding Caldwell’s own theory, as a sort of continuation of the Structuralist program of the twentieth century. However, Caldwell does not take Saussure’s idea of ‘langue’ to be anything other than a heuristic, and deems the failures of Structuralism (and current standard theory) to be a result of mistaking the formal model of language that arose out of this program for an explanation of language itself.
Following from this in section three, Caldwell endeavours to begin where Saussure finished. Approaching language from a non-formalist perspective he seeks to arrive at an explanatory theory that is primarily concerned with speech, and only concerned secondarily with language in the abstract or formal sense. On such a view, speech is not a transmission system for encoding and decoding messages, but a semiotic medium where meaning is created within a temporary and emergent structure – the molecular sememe – arising out of the perceptual structures of the human mind.
In the final sections of this chapter, Caldwell details some of the structural characteristics of the molecular sememe. It is a macro-structure, a complex unit, which is given focus by the teleological structures of the discourse it exists within. These teleological structures are expressions of intention by speakers in a discourse, which organise themselves to focus on a particular molecular sememe, and give meaning to the sentences of the speaker.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
On the other hand, the function of the molecular sememe at the level of the semiotic is not theoretically different from the function of the phoneme at the level of the phonology. Both are synthetic orders. More about this later.
- 2.
Since this is characteristic of ordinary language, this study will, accordingly, allow as data only sentences which were written or spoken within the need to make sense about something (as opposed, say, to sentences written specifically to illustrate principles of speaker competence). Artificial languages are not included in this study.
- 3.
On the other side, see Hjelmslev’s criticisms of the use of induction in linguistic description (1961, p. 12).
- 4.
- 5.
[Editors’ Note: Caldwell does not identify a specific source in his bibliography. Peter Shillingsburg, however, very reasonably suspects that the text being discussed is Bloomfield’s Language from 1933.]
- 6.
- 7.
And sometimes not pre-constrained very much at all. Take, for example, a conversation in which you ask me, “Where is Princeton?”
“It’s in New Jersey”, I might say. “Look. Here’s New York City” (placing a salt shaker in the middle of the table), “and here’s Philadelphia” (placing the pepper shaker two feet distant). “Then Princeton would be here” (marking the spot, more or less between them, with an ash tray).
In this case, the arbitrariness of the sign seems a little more obvious, and it may suggest that the arbitrariness is precisely a lack of necessary relation between previous and present uses. Of course, someone is sure to take the representation of Princeton by means of an ash tray as somehow less than arbitrary.
- 8.
There is a second molecule here too, in which both members are marked successively: {life/breath}. Again, they take their meanings partly from their own histories, and partly from their juxtaposition here, and the progression is anti-climactic rather than climactic. There is, thus, a counter-movement among the molecules of the sentence which in itself may complicate the total emotional meaning.
- 9.
I prefer the term “ordinary language” to the term “natural language”, though of course natural language is what I mean. But the term “natural language” has been, ironically, appropriated for use by the formalists, as they look for the linguistic theory whose grammars “correspond to possible human languages” (Jackendoff 1972, p. 12). Clearly, for them, a language has to be possible before it can exist.
- 10.
Inductive procedures do, as Hjelmslev warned us, frequently invite the hypostasizing of mere generalities, leading to the illusion that all meaning fits somewhere into a gigantic matrix of all possible generalities. When that happens it is easy to assume the legitimacy of abstracting even such distinctions as ‘determined’ and ‘nondetermined’ or ‘good’ and ‘bad’ into classemes or categories (Cf Greimas, 1983, p. 108), thus conveying explanatory authority on attributes that themselves need explaining.
- 11.
Some words (common names of ordinary things, such as “horse”) can forgiveably be thought to ‘have’ or ‘contain’ meaning, but it would be more accurate to think of them as tokens, or as things having been assigned an acoustic or visual representation. Thus, the word “horse” will be used as if it were a bit of currency. By analogy to the idea of monetary value, we might say that horses, if they were all valued the same, could be used as a medium of exchange; but since they are some trouble to move about, we might print up a piece of paper with a picture of a horse on it, and exchange it instead in confidence that it could be treated as having the worth of a horse. In some such sense, the word “horse” is a coin having the ‘worth’ of a horse, to be put to use in any exchange in which horses might provide a useful currency.
- 12.
True, there is a difference between ‘weak’ molecules – say the molecule containing all the possible answers to the question, “Whom are you going to invite to your party?” – and strong molecules, such as that containing all the possible answers to “Are you married?”. The difference is measurable, as are the number of terms in the molecule and the degree of contrastiveness among them.
- 13.
I submit this axiom with fear and trembling, given the apparently unassailable status binarism has. As A. J. Greimas said in his 1966 Structural Semantics, “The elementary structure, considered and described ‘in itself’, that is, outside of any signifying content, can only be binary, not because of theoretical reasons which have not been elucidated and which have to be rejected at the epistemological level of language, but rather because of the present consensus of linguistics” (1983, p. 25).
- 14.
As all this implies, I am suggesting that Jakobson’s phonemic analyses, no matter how relevant and useful they are to other kinds of inquiry, must be avoided as methodologically misleading with regard to the investigation of parole. As Jakobson admits, “Like musical scales, phonemic patterning is an intervention of culture in nature, an artifact imposing logical rules upon the sound continuum” (1971, p. 475).
- 15.
In this I recognize some accord with Jakobson, who, following Peirce, also recognized a sense in which “interpretation” equals “translation”. Cf. Jakobson’s “A Few Remarks on Peirce” in Jakobson 1980.
- 16.
In a Peircean analysis of the meaning of the biscuit, much would be made of the “respect” in which the sign stands to mean something to someone. There are many affinities between the Peircean semeiotic and Molecular Sememics; one of the more intriguing is the similarity in role between the molecule and Peirce’s interpretant.
- 17.
In the tradition of much linguistic research, we should perhaps itemize and catalog the discreta of sensory perception as a binary code of distinctive perceptual features. But while it is important to realize that molecules and perceptions are both macro-structures, and that they are made of a great many sensory discreta of many kinds, it is not relevant to a theory of meaning or perception to itemize them.
- 18.
The prima facie implausibility of this assumption has not, however, prevented it from becoming an apparently axiomatic part of the scientific method as it applies to linguistics. Such legitimacy as it has stems mainly from the work of Jakobson, whose “universal inventory” of distinctive phonological features has the virtues of being relatable to physical (i.e. acoustic) phenomena, and of being a short list. Chomsky slides quite easily from Jakobson’s “substantive universals” to his own “formal universals” (1965, pp. 28–32), and becomes the first thinker in 200 years to propose innate ideas once again. Greimas, who claims to oppose such formalism, seems embarrassed to defend his own assumption: “The a priori nature of the simple hypothesis characterizes all scientific research: the objection that it introduces a subjective element in the description is not, in principle, valid” (1983, p. 36). That a universal inventory of possible meanings (semes) should consist of, say, ‘durativity’ or ‘relative quantity’ or ‘laterality’ does not suggest that the list will be short. What it suggests is that Hjelmslev is right: such inductive method “inevitably leads to the abstraction of concepts which are then hypostatized as real” (1961, p. 12). Thus, the semic inventory amounts merely to an incomplete nominalism, whose circle can’t be closed.
- 19.
Its opposite may be “full” in an etic sense, but its counter in the molecule is something for which there is no single word: “there’s enough hydrogen peroxide for the orderly’s use”.
- 20.
It may be instructive to note that for the speaker, the molecule consists of all possibilities that to him appear possible within the logic of his isotopy. For the listener, the molecule must consist of the possibilities that appear probable, within what he guesses the isotopy must be. Needless to say, the speaker and listener may be thinking, however unconsciously, of different sets of possibilities, and/or of different rankings of the items in those sets. This is a source, obviously, of error in interpretation. And there of course is always the likelihood that the molecule, both for the speaker and the listener, partly consists of unspecified contents. To this extent both speaker and listener are unconscious of the means by which they arrive at their intentions (speaker) and interpretations (listener).
- 21.
We are accustomed to thinking of the syntactic and semantic components of language as existing on two planes, 90 degrees away from each other. Thus, we expect any terms which can be substituted for each other to be alike on at least one plane, even if they differ on another. Here, though, are two terms which seem to be opposites on the semantic plane, yet aren’t quite parallel to each other on the syntactic plane. There is more indeterminacy in the system than structuralists have typically thought.
Bibliography
Bloomfield, L. (1933). Language. New York: Henry Holt.
Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Chomsky, N. (1968). Language and mind. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
Culler, J. (1975a). Struturalist poetics: Structuralism. In Linguistics and the Study of literature. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
de Saussure, F. (1959). Course in general linguistics (W. Baskin, Trans.). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Eco, U. (1976). A theory of semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge (A. M. Sheridan Smith, Trans.). New York: Pantheon.
Givon, T. (1979). On understanding grammar. New York: Academic.
Greimas, A. J. (1983). Stuctural semantics: An attempt at a method (D. McDowell, R. Schleifer, & A. Velie, Trans.). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Hjelmslev, L. (1961). Prolegomena to a theory of language (F. J. Whitfield, Trans.). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Jackendoff, R. S. (1972). Semantic interpretation in generative grammar. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Jakobson, R. (1949). On the identification of phonemic entities. Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague, 5, 205–213. Reprinted (1971) in his Selected writings: Vol. 1, Phonological studies (pp. 418–425). The Hague: Mouton.
Jakobson, R. (1978). Six lectures on sound and meaning (J. Mepham, Trans.). Cambridge: MIT Press.
Jakobson, R. (1980). The framework of language. Ann Arbor: Michigan Studies in the Humanities.
Jakobson, R., & Halle, M. (1956). Fundamentals of language. The Hague: Mouton.
Jakobson, R. (Ed.). (1971a). Selected writings, Vol. 1: Phonological studies. The Hague: Mouton.
Jakobson, R., Fant, G. M., & Halle, M. (1951). Preliminaries to speech analysis: The distinctive features and their correlates. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Katz, J. J., & Postal, P. (1964). An integrated theory of linguistic descriptions. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Levi-Strauss, C. (1963). Structural anthropology (C. Jacobson & B. G. Schoepf, Trans.). New York: Basic Books.
Levi-Strauss, C. (1966). The savage mind. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Pike, K. L. (1967). Language in relation to a unified theory of the structure of human behaviour (2nd ed.). The Hague: Mouton.
Quine, W. V. O. (1972). Methodological reflections on current linguistic theory. In D. Davidson & G. Harman (Eds.), Semantics of natural language (pp. 442–454). New York: Springer.
Sapir, E. (1921). Language: An introduction to the study of speech. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.
Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wardhaugh, R. (1969). Reading: A linguistic perspective. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Caldwell, T.P., Cresswell, O., Stainton, R.J. (2018). Molecular Sememics (Unfinished Book Manuscript). In: Cresswell, O., Stainton, R. (eds) Discourse, Structure and Linguistic Choice. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 101. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75441-3_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75441-3_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-75440-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-75441-3
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)