Abstract
The type-token-tone distinction has reached a grand old age and is apparently dead. The purpose of this note is not to write another obituary, but rather to consider one chapter of the testament. It will be claimed that the sentence-utterance-inscription distinction, which is a young offspring of Peirce’s trichotomy, should be promoted in order to grant it the status it deserves in linguistic theory, viz., as a small pillar in the theory of linguistic performance. This claim will be defended by clarifying the nature of the members of our triad, outlining their mutual relations within a theory of linguistic performance, and showing how this subtheory of linguistic performance is related to the theory of linguistic competence.
This work was supported in part by the Air force Office of Scientific Research, through the European Office of Aerospace Research, OAR under contract No. F 61052-68-C-0036 (with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem). I am indebted to Professor Y. Bar-Hillel for invaluable comments on a draft of this paper.
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Notes
L. H. Gray. Foundations of Language, Macmillan, New York, 1939, pp. 224–5.
R. A. Jacobs and P. S. Rosenbaum, English Transformational Grammar, Blaisdell, Waltham, 1968, p. 6.
That people can grasp what string of formative has been uttered without understanding it, is well known to aphasiologists. Cf. E. Weigl and M. Bierwisch, ‘Neuropsychology and Linguistics: Topics of Common Research’, Foundations of Language, 6 (1970), 7 8.
It may be worthwhile to examine the following ‘grammatical evolution’ hypothesis: From one stage to the next in the course of natural linguistic ontogenesis and phylogenesis the degree of wellformedness of any string of formatives cum a unique syntactic structure of it changes by no more than k, which is a low natural number. The absolute value of k depends on the general linguistic theory within which the hypothesis is formulated. Cf. J. Lyons, ‘Existence, Location. Possession and Transitivity’, in: Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, III (ed. by B. Van Rootselaar and J. F. Staal) North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1968, p. 502.
Cf. C. E. Osgood, “Contextual Control in Sentence Understanding and Creating”, in: Speech, Language and Communication (ed. by E. C. Carterette), California University Press, Los Angeles and Berkeley, 1966, p. 206, and L. L. Earl, V. B. Bhimani, and R. P. Mitchell, ‘Statistics of Operationally Defined Homonyms of Elementary Words’, Mechanical Translation, 10 (1967)
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© 1971 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht-Holland
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Kasher, A. (1971). A Step Toward a Theory of Linguistic Performance. In: Bar-Hillel, Y. (eds) Pragmatics of Natural Languages. Synthese Library, vol 41. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-1713-8_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-1713-8_5
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