by Ole Nedergaard Thomsen
Updated version 11.01.2012. Work in progress. Comments are utterly welcome!
Parallels with Peircean Semiotics, von Uexküllian cognitive-semiotic/bio-cybernetic biology (behaviorism/ethology), and Brier's (2008) Cybersemiotics.
An orig. English version 2010 of a 'functional footnote' from 1998: "Stratifikation og "treenigheden" Materie--Substans--Form. Et Funktionelt Pragmatisk perspektiv". Published in 'DFG -- Funktionelle Fodnoter: Sprogligt indhold: substans og struktur. Funktionelle Fodnoter' 1998. 56-58.
This paper will investigate linguistic stratification – the crucial conception that language and speech, rather than... more
This paper will investigate linguistic stratification – the crucial conception that language and speech, rather than being monolithic, are organized on different ‘representational levels’.
Linguistic Stratification is originally a European structuralist notion, proposed (i.a.) by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1916) to deal with the fact that a language and its performance in speech occur on two different hierarchical levels of representation, viz. one of arbitrary ‘form’ and one of manifestational ‘substance’ (alias ‘matter’), both on the plane of Content (meaning) and on the plane of Expression (confusingly, “form” in the American tradition, however presumably going back to the Gr. morphé, not eidos). The claim is that language is (primarily) ‘form’ (structure, system), irrespective of its material manifestation. Form and substance, of course, originate in Aristotelian philosophy, where, however, the distinction was triadic rather than dyadic – the tri-unity ‘form’, ‘substance’, and ‘matter’ – and did not pertain to language-internal distinctions in the first place but to ontology in general – and thus did not mean levels of linguistic representation, but rather levels of reality. The Danish hard core, pseudo-algebraic linguist Louis Hjelmslev (1943, 1975), confusingly, wavers between the dyadic and the triadic conceptions (strangely calling ‘matter’ purport, Dan. mening ‘meaning’), but most often, it seems, he uses the dichotomy ‘form’ vs. ‘substance’ (Dahl 1998), however, in a rather Platonic conception, where linguistic ‘form’ exists in a “third” world, in casu of ideal Language, relegating phenomenal language to a subsidiary “shadowy” world of the “real” speaker-listeners and their speech communities. That is, in former formal European structuralism (like Hjelmslevian Glossematics) the essence of language was seen as ‘form’ (viz. “pure” ‘form’) presupposed by, but not presupposing a manifesting ‘substance’ (of sensibilia and intelligibilia). In functional European structuralism (e.g., esp. Jakobson and the Prague school), in Coseriu’s Integral Linguistics (a post-structuralist functionalism), as well as in present-day Danish Functional Linguistics, including Functional Discourse Pragmatics (developed by the present author), ‘form’ is “substantial”. This means that the distinction between vocal and sign language are different (medial-modal) ‘forms’, ruling out the possibility of postulating an underlying “pure” form uniting e.g. Danish vocal and sign languages – they are simply two different (historical) functional languages (competences). Likewise, the distinction between spoken and written language is a distinction in terms of (medial-modal) “substantial” ‘forms’: spoken and written Danish, e.g., are two different historical (medial-modal) forms, not united by any common underlying “pure” (‘empty’) form – the written language is a partial “translation” of the spoken language, the degree to which being determined by the kind of writing system developed (alphabetical, in the case of Danish, to be sure, so roughly it is only the sound shape of the language that is being translated). The concept of stratification is continued in different schools and trends of non-generative (functionalist) linguistics, like i.a. Lamb’s Stratificational Linguistics (cf. Lamb 1999), Pike's Tagmemics, Halliday’s Systemic-Functional Linguistics (Halliday 1961; Halliday and Matthiessen 1999), and Henning Andersen’s comprehensive structural-functional (semiotics-based) linguistics (1974, 1984), but also in Chomskyan generative (formal) linguistics, with its distinction, within the language faculty, between the conceptual-intentional (pragmatics) and articulatory-auditory (phonetics) peripheral input-output systems (performance systems) and the central logical-form (semantics) and phonetic-form (phonology) systems (plus, maybe, a lexico-grammatical-syntactic form) (computational competence system).
This paper will argue for the triadic conception within a Functional Discourse Pragmatics theory of language and speech (i.a., Nedergaard Thomsen 2006, 2009) – (proposed as) the linguistic part of Cybersemiotics (i.a., Brier 2008). In effect, the triadic stratification of language is integrated into the triadic ontological stratification. Seeing language and speech, in their foundation, as mental phenomena of individual speaker-listeners, these semiotic phenomena of signs (Expression) and their interpretations (Content) belong to the ontological Form level. The signs (Expression) are manifested at the level of ontological Substance, as output of articulation and as input to perception (Sinsigns), and in themselves they may be part of our sound surroundings without being perceived as functioning signs (Matter, Qualisigns). The interpretations (Content) – via the signs (Expression) – are “referenced” in the immediate referential sphere (Substance), our Umwelt, but the “same” objective world may exist objectively outside the grasp (domain) of our language and speech (Matter). This picture is complicated by the fact that language and speech, i.e. ontological Form, is internally stratified: here the level of internal Form consists of systematic invariants, manifested as norm-sanctioned variants (internal Substance) and projected as stylistic-situational usage variants (internal Matter). The Content side of the language (interpretations) form a linguistic ‘mentality’, whereby we (the speaker-listeners of different languages) come to live our (linguistic) lives in different “language worlds” (language-based Umwelts, or Cultural Signification Spheres, Brier 2008) – just as we as a biological species live in our species-specific Umwelt (von Uexküll) – e.g. we don’t hear the same sounds or smell the same scents as our dogs. The degree to which the linguistic interpretations (Content) influence the sensations and interpretations in perception – i.e., the degree to which linguistic semantics “construes” our experience (Halliday and Matthiessen 1999), we may speak of linguistic (“Whorfian”) relativity. On a higher level of socio-cultural behavior, cultural relativity is operative (language mirroring culture). The degree to which thinking (due to sensations and interpretations) is uninfluenced by (a historical) language (or other communication system, like e.g. music) and culture, i.e. is universal, we may speak of a ‘mentalese’ (Language of Thought). With respect to the processual mode of being of language as speech, or “languaging”, Slobin (1987) discovered that the obligatory, grammatical categories, influence our ‘thinking’ operative for/in (while) speaking, and communicating in general.
I dedicate this paper to the memory of the great Danish phonetician, Eli Fischer-Jørgensen (1911-2010), who, besides being a brilliant scientist, was a brave freedom fighter (during WWII), and a fine artist – and, relevant to this paper, a astute critique of Hjelmslev’s concept of ‘form’ and ‘substance’.
Download (.doc) 
