by Hugh M. Lewis

The worldview problem has been of central theoretical importance in general anthropological accounts of how human beings come to construct and construe their world. This is a systematic theory of the worldview problem based upon a theory of language, a theory of psychological meaning, and a theory of culture as symbolic construction. Worldview triangulates and locates the identity of any particular aspect of human reality between these three sets of factors and the complex, dynamic dialectics which their mutual interaction and constraint produces.

The central question in the worldview problem is that of the critical role and status of language in the symbolic mediation and construction of reality. Our language underlies how we view our world as well as our socially based knowledge of the world. Without language, our construction of the human world as we know would not have been possible. But language is as equally conditioned and constrained by factors of human cognition and culture as it may be held to be predeterminative of them. It is for this reason that an anthropological theory that takes the problem of language in relation to worldview clearly into account is the most important component of the worldview problem.

An anthropological theory of language in relation to the worldview problem must answer several basic questions: language change and stability, language structure and pattern, and the central and strategic social functionality of language in the human construction of reality. None of these problems are fully understood from the standpoint of a scientific linguistics.

Language is holistically integrated as a symbolic system that communicates meaning, but its integration is never complete or total. Integration is necessary for a language to function effectively as a communication system and entails the gradual working out of some minimal structure, especially in syntactic or sentential patterns of verbal articulation. This structure has been arrived at through social patterning of language as a conventional system of oral/aural human communication.

Normal syntax is therefore a restricted part of a broader and looser semantic system that is itself fundamentally symbolic in functional patterning. Syntax therefore shares the same fundamental symbolic features as does morphology and semantics. Human symbolization is unique for its indirect reference of its signifiers, which results in duality of patterning between sign and signification. Syntax involves the mechanical marking of special words and categories of words as sign that take a definite place or syntagmatic position in a sentential structure. The signification function of words becomes implicit to their meaning.

From a holistic standpoint of the common gestalt symbolic pattern of language, culture and cognition, language is relative to the culture in which it is situated and to which it is symbolically tied through shared cognitive patterns. Language is inextricably tied to human cognition, and makes available patterns of thought and meaning that are otherwise unavailable. From an analytical point of view, all languages share affinities of context and functional pattern that entails the possibility of inter-translatability of language. Relativity of language is not to be found in discrete instances of words and meanings, but in the overall patterning of integration of language, culture and cognition. It is a mistake for analytically oriented linguists to search for specific examples of language relativity. It is expressed through the pattern of integration as a whole. This pattern is not unamenable to etic-elicitation and comparative analysis, but it can only be demonstrated through means that are statistical in result.

Being relative does not mean that language determines culture or cognition or that culture or cognition determines the other. In all, language, culture and cognition all tend to be inherently underdetermined in structure and causal relation. They are only partially structured, or "semi-structured" and therefore they resist precise mathematical and theoretical description. It is both its strength and its weakness--strength for its infinite permutations possible and for its flexibility and adaptability, and a weakness for its common misunderstanding and intractability to theoretical explication. The structuring of language, culture and cognition are in a sense evolutionarily minimal--it meets the requirements of what is "sufficient and necessary" to accomplish the tasks that are important to human survival and adaptation in the world. The evolutionary embeddedness of language, culture and cognition in our anthropological definition and natural sense of being human in the world is the source of its determined structure.

Structure and change in a language are caught in a dynamic dialectic around the problem of increasing coherence and decreasing entropy. In human language this becomes critical in spoken discourse when we can properly speak of the phenomena of the linguistic transmission of information. Spoken discourse must effect a "resonance" not only at the linguistic level of a string of signs, but upon a metalinguistic level of the symbolisms these signs point to in the world. Thus at the moment of speech production, language must not only be about itself, but about something in the world and about the world that something is within.

Languages must maintain a flexibility of pattern that is a key to their functional adaptability and their boundless productivity. All languages function best at an optimum level of structure. Internal changes tend to increase the coherence of a language system, but a system can become too constrained and thus compromise its external functional flexibility in the world. Thus there are built-in limits upon the amount of structure and degree of variation possible within human language.

Language must affect an optimal trade-off between internal coherence and external consistency in encoding the world. It is a trade-off accomplished by balancing the structural constraints at the level of the sign--at the level of communication, with the expressive freedom at the metalinguistic and symbolic level of meaning.

It accomplishes this dynamic equilibrium of an optimal level of functioning by means of a transformational calculus marking the permutation and modification of linguistic components, and a mechanism of mediation marking the transition from one statement to the next.

It is at this point that we must see linguistic structure as inherently and inextricably embedded in social context of the discursive speech event. We may properly speak of the phenomenological process of linguistic construction that is guided by certain indirectly implicit and embedded conventions rather than as a structure per se. The rules that guide linguistic structure and its redundancy of pattern in construction in the maintenance of its communicative efficacy, are ultimately social products of shared constraints. They are performance rules that meet certain conventional criteria of social functionality.

We must separate the question of linguistic performance from the notion of linguistic competence, and tacitly, the notion of parole of the actual speaker-hearer versus langue ideal speaker-hearer. The fact of the inherent sociality and social situatedness of all language precludes the possibility of language being primarily a psychological phenomenon. Competency and Langue are rooted in the inherent, biologically based and evolutionarily rooted human capacity for speech production and language--it is a capacity which all human beings, by definition of their nature, share--just as we have two hands, two eyes, etc. From this fact, and from the common constraints placed upon all natural languages, there arises the notion of the virtual equivalency of all languages to be able to meet, more or less well, the minimum need of human communication. Certain design features of language, such as openness, productivity, symbolizaton, duality of patterning, are inherent and implicit in the definition of human language--a system of communication cannot be without these features and be fully regarded as a human language.

We must note and take exception with the idea of the ideal "Structure" of language, especially that this "structure" must somehow be genetically hard wired in the brain of the ideal speaker-hearer. We are led by this notion to search for a "mathematically" correct universal grammar that sees language as a kind of perfect communication machine. This is the point at which we must recognize the critical difference between our own formalistic constructions of abstract language and the informal and functional constructions of natural language. What guides language as on-going speech production is not some formalized and formulaic universal grammar, but the historically and socially embedded constraints which are placed upon speech production--functionally necessary constraints if language is to be language at all.

Natural language accomplishes several feats, which if seen from the standpoint of a formal theory, should be logically impossible. First, it allows the rationalization of meaning by means of certain kinds of fallacies. Secondly, it allows the possibility of the incorporation of contradiction into its structure--something that by logical definition would be impossible in a finite state machine. In other words, we must account for the orderly construction of language not in terms of some presumed "Structure" but in terms of an inherent lack of structure that it must overcome in order to achieve its primary functions of communication and expression.

The notion of Structure in language is tied up to the problem of linguistic change. Structure must account for, and be accounted for by, the capacity of all languages to change continuously and yet remain by design and definition language. Change must be constrained in certain universal ways. Certain dimensions of language allow for change and make change possible, while other dimensions are held to be unchangeable. Since nothing in the universe seems unchangeable, either we posit some noumenal a priori ideal of an absolute structure or language or we must entertain the possibility that language structure itself may have been evolving.

Again we are left with a basic choice in the study of language between such a language "Structure," one which remains hypothetical and perhaps unprovable, and the study of language as the phenomena of speech within a social context. It seems, in light of the history of this debate, the emphasis of either alternative result in the devaluation of the other.

As most people do, pursuing the study of language as a separate phenomenon with an underlying universal structure has two consequences, that of positing a structural relationship between different languages where none may in fact exist, and of ignoring those actual social and historical processes and principles of patterning involved in the construction of language as an ongoing discursive phenomena.

A language is composed of many elements upon several interrelated levels of functional process. Change may occur among any of its elements, along any of its dimensions, upon any of its levels, but some kinds of changes may be more likely to occur among some elements or areas of a language than in others, while other elements or dimensions may be very resistant to change, and this differential will vary substantially between different languages. All languages nevertheless tend to share basic processes and prototypical forms that are tied to the common human speech organs, our common social needs of communication and to the common ground of basic meaning in the world.

The basic mechanism of linguistic change is held to be the stylistic variation which human speech is heir to. The possibility for this variation arises in the openness and productivity of language as a symbolic system of communication. This is the source of its adaptability and flexibility to produce an infinite variation of meaning, as well as of its intrinsic ambiguity and incorporation of contradiction. This mechanism of stylistic variation of speech pattern drives both internal and external process of change, or what can be called endogenous change and exogenous change. Though it is the primary engine of language change, most stylistic variation fails to "catch on" and take hold in a language.

The determining factors of whether a variation catches on are balanced by two principles, the increase in the communicative efficiency or reduction of ambiguity and the increase of the expressiveness of language, or the augmentation of ambiguity. Furthermore, incorporation of new elements or variations of old element, may produce reverberations throughout a language which may result in other changes in other elements and aspects of a system, or else create the potential for alteration in other places in the system. Stylistic variation is motivated by numerous social and psychological factors, not least of which are the desire for individual self-expression and the empowerment this brings, and the creation of social speech boundaries which mark status differences between people. The short term variation of language thus obfuscates its long-term stability and its actual rate of development a language may take. We can expect that over the long term, endogenous drift of a language should be rather stable.

Endogenous change has two contradictory consequences. First it drives a language towards greater internal coherence, but at the cost of external expressiveness and variability. Secondly, it accomplishes what may be called evolutionary linguistic divergence and fission, as two groups with a common parent language drift apart to become two entirely separated languages. At first glance, these two consequences of endogenous change appear to be contradictory, but on closer scrutiny we can see how they may in fact be complementary processes in which the drive towards increasing internal coherence will tend to create linguistic boundaries between speakers will none had existed before, resulting in linguistic separation and isolation, and in processes of linguistic schismogenesis.

We can see exogenous linguistic change has having an opposite set of effects upon a language. In the first place, exogenous change will tend to increase the variability and reduce the internal coherence of a language--this function will be an inevitable response to the ambiguity of two different speakers attempting to understand one another. Though is increases the internal ambiguity of a language, the overall effect of this kind of change is one of linguistic fusion and convergence. Sometimes such convergence will either dramatically alter the borrowing language, or an entirely new language may emerge from the process of linguistic amalgamation. One aspect of exogenous change is that unlike endogenous change it is over the long run discontinuous and erratic in its effects.

We can understand the history of language change then to have been one of an ongoing dialectic between endogenous and exogenous factors of change. This dialectic, as previously noted, revolves around stylistic variability that is functionally motivated and which is an inevitable consequence of the trade-off in human language between internal coherence and external expressiveness. This dialectic has been one as to reveal few uniform and consistent processes of language change. We can expect that internal and external sources of change are in their effect upon language always in a kind of mutually constraining dynamic equilibrium. Exogenous change can only alter a language so drastically before the language as an effective system of communication breaks down, endogenous changes can only work to constrain a language so much before it becomes "too coherent."

The question of structure in language is an important one. "Structure" would be better replaced by the term construction and this construction of language follows certain functional and symbolic designs. The rules that guide the construction of language are largely implicit and only indirectly constraining in linguistic production, they are performance rules. It is useful to analyze the construction of language upon three levels of its patterning. The relational level of its sign/symbol that refers to semantics, the syntactic level of sentence construction, and the functional external level of discourse, or supra-sentential context, which refers mostly to pragmatics. But it must be remembered that in actual language patterning these three levels at which the construction of language occurs cannot be clearly separated from one another. Thus semantics, syntactics and pragmatics are interpenetrated by one another.

The beginning point in understanding the internal order of meaning and its relationship to meaning is to understand the root connection between the linguistic sign and the thing in the world that the sign points to. All language structure and meaning comes to focus upon this central relationship. In the case of human language, this relationship is inherently symbolic. The sign does not have to have identity with the thing it symbolizes. It is held to be arbitrary.

From this standpoint we can argue that the function of structure in language is to construct and mediate a symbolic boundary between internal and external levels of meaning of the sign. This is the source of its alleged symbolic duality of patterning. The external functionality of language results in the extrinsic structure, while internal functionality characterizes its intrinsic structure. Extrinsic structure references a background field of relational values that is mostly implicit. Intrinsic structure registers internal value that is explicit. It is a finite sign that incorporates the infinite universe of meanings. It is in this way that linguistic meaning is encoded.

On the most basic level we can assume that a linguistic element encodes information which is implicitly embedded within a background field of relational values. Explicit encoding must optimize between the principle of economy, or of least effort, and the principle of value, or greatest effect.

In terms of this encoding, certain implicit categories of significance are left to be inferred or tacitly presumed, and others may be explicit referred to. We make a distinction between overt and covert categories. At this level the problem of syntax is clearly seen as intrinsic to the problem of meaning. Explicit encoding is also seen as a means of marking a relational category or characteristic as especially significant In general, unmarked categories that remain implicitly embedded in the background relational field are considered to be more basic to the structure of meaning. Marking is construed as a means of emphasizing some elements in a field over others, and entails an intrinsic form of valuation, or significant contrast, between marked and unmarked elements or relations. To turn what is basically, or implicitly a noun in a normal field of relations into a verb, certain transformations of marking must be effected--similarly to change what remains implicitly a verb into a noun, other conventions marking the transformation must be effected, such as turning "is" into "An 'Is'."

It is primarily by means of such marking that the variability, productivity and openness of language as a symbolic system of communication is achieved, and it is in terms of transformational rules, the conventional regularity and experimentation in word play that most stylistic variation, hence linguistic modification, come about.

In this framework, it can be seen that meaning is by its design arbitrary. There are no fixed, a priori, absolute or non-relative relations that predetermine the significance of any particular sign for all time. This intrinsic flexibility in the use of signs in human language is called the associational value of the element. Each and every sign may be used in a variety of ways--but this usage entails the syntactic marking by means of conventional formula. Syntactic order enters into the transformations of basic meanings by means of the superimposition of conventions in the use of linguistic elements. Even the deliberate violation such conventions must themselves be somehow "marked" as such.

Meaning and meaning making in human language are characterized by two features of design. First, basicness presumes an implicit "prototypical" field of relations that reveal interesting facets about human knowledge. On a common sense level, the basic categories of meaning, though largely cultural in construction, form the substrate of linguistic value and signification. Basicness of categories is widely presumed to be a universal substrate of phenomenological experience and cognition in the world--the case of the near-universal acquisition of basic color terms reveals how our common experience may be similarly ordered upon a subconscious level.

Basicness defines the center of gravity of meaning of a basic category of relational value, but it does not clearly mark the boundaries or outermost periphery of such categories. Basic categories that mark the centrality but not the peripheries of meaning, are usually regarded as mutually exclusive, and therefore as hierarchically related, and tend to be encoded in basic, unmarked, and unambiguous forms. We can speculate upon certain marginal or derivative or secondary categories which serve the function of defining the peripheries of basic categories, and which tend to be mutually nonexclusive and nonhierarchical in relation with one another, and which are more marked, more inherently ambiguous and highly elaborated. We can assume that these secondary categories are more explicitly marked by conventional constraints than are basic categories, because they tend to be more ambiguous.

Another complementary aspect of this is what might be called the "embedding of conventional constraint" in the implicit field of relations such that categorical markers which are clearly conventional artifices, are nevertheless normally construed as if basic and natural to the background field of relations. This embedding is accounted for in several ways, and it becomes the basis for the inherent stability and conservatism of language, and for its great functionality in the world. It is largely a function of the way information becomes neurally encoded in the brain. Not only are basic categories marked out in this way, but a cultural construction that proceeds to delineate a greater number of derivative categories also entails the neuronal embedding of this knowledge in the brain. This "embedding" of constraint within language is the principle means of increasing the coherence of language and reducing its ambiguity. We must distinguish this implicit embedding of constraint in language from the explicit encoding which marks its normal usage. This implicit embedding follows the contours of basicness and thus serves to mark out and define more clearly the boundaries about basic culturally constructed categories. The more refined and fine-tuned the pattern recognition function of a language may be in a certain domain, the greater the number of secondary categories will be marked out as if primary and basic, and the more implicit and "basic" will be the constraints that achieve this marking, and the less the ambiguity that exists between these categories.

We can expect cross-cultural convergence toward the more basic categories of meaning, and greater divergence along the more peripheral categories. We can also expect that if there is a lower limit of the substrate of "basicness" of relational categories, there may also be an upper ceiling or limit upon the number of derived categories which can become effectively embedded. Expert knowledge is an example of these kinds of limits--human expertise entails a great sophistication and refinement along focal areas, but great depth is achieved at the cost of breadth. From this standpoint, not only do different cultures very significantly in the number of basic categories they mark out, but also in the number of domains of relation which they mark for such embedding.

In relation to this, it is worthwhile to consider embedding in relation to elaboration. We can expect that wherever we find greater elaboration of certain relational domains, there will also occur greater embedding of conventions upon secondary categories. Elaboration is the explicit marking of secondary categories in such a way as to incorporate greater variability in the patterning. We refer to this as stylization, and it bears an interesting relationship with the communicative function of the enhancement of coherence and reduction of ambiguity. Elaboration recalls the expressive function of language, and is tied up in its marking and explicitness. Elaboration, by virtue of its marked character, provides a means of making manifest the marginal and implicitly ambiguous. It should be expected that as elaboration proceeds, embedding of convention will follow. We can see clearly the expressive, experimental and exploratory function of language play in the process of elaborating marginal areas of reality.

There is another way of looking at the relationship between embedding and elaboration. Elaboration proceeds where embedding can follow. There are marginal boundaries of all knowledge where embedding cannot follow elaboration, because of the inherent limits of the embedding function. In these regions, even elaboration must be explicitly constrained, because it no longer serves its function of precipitating embedding. We can expect in these areas to find the most explicit constraints of convention, which are not concerned with expressive elaboration so much as with the reduction of ambiguity by the increase of coherence. We can expect that these areas come to have a certain "negative basicness" about them in that they point to a center or locus of conventional, categorical constraint which is exclusive and hierarchical, but which leaves the margins to be defined by elaboration. Explicit constraints are thus hedged all about by elaboration, though they appear to share the same categorical imperative of function as do implicit basic categories.

There is in the relation between basic implicit categories and basic explicit constraints of elaboration, a certain shadow effect in which such constraints, though conventional and arbitrary, come to acquire a basicness about them which is similar to basic categories. This can be put in another way--basic categories tend toward the simplification of the explicit encoding, and so do basic constraints. Neither are enumerated or elaborated at any great length, though both are hedged all about by much embedding and elaboration.

In this explanation, we proceed upon a continuum from the most basic and implicit categories of experience, through marginal embedded and elaborated categories of constraint, to basic and explict categories. There is in this movement a dialectic between implicit meaning and explicit constraint.

This brings up an important point about language--all implicit relations are virtually encodable, or are capable of being made explicit, whether or not they actually are. This is a basic design feature of human language--all human languages share the capacity for encoding any and every relation possible. Given the paradigmatic structure of certain languages, it certainly holds that certain categories are less readily encodable in some languages than others--the finite structure of any given language may make it extremely difficult to encode some forms of relation and very easy to encode others. This comprehensiveness of language is tied to its productivity and openness as a coherence system.

We have arrived at the point of considering what a language paradigm consists of and what factors may account for a particular organization of a language paradigm. In order to do so, we need to account for the basic structure of the sentence. Intrinsic relational structure is that which is specific to the construction of sentences. All other relations that impinge upon the significance of an utterance are to be regarded as extrinsic. Intrinsic meaning is always explicit, except where it has become embedded. Put simply, any language paradigm consists of a control structure that governs the intrinsic structure of language at the level of sentence construction. It is the sentential paradigm of a language that governs the type of marking and transformations possible within the intrinsic structure of a language.

There is no need to posit a universal deep structure to the construction of such paradigms, for they remain largely culturally implicit and conservative. It is unlikely that, given the requirements of natural language in terms of the flexible decoding and encoding of the world in a coherent and consistent way, it should be mathematically structured like any finite-state machine. The logic of the paradigmatic structure is largely informal and defined by its exceptions and variations. We can posit certain minimum constraints that any language must systematically incorporate in order to maximize coherence, such that syntax should have an optimum level given the design features inherent in human language. Exactly what these constraints may be will vary widely between different languages, and the results of different sets of constraints will produce differential patterns.

In this regard the lesson of translation from one code to another is information. It entails the transformational encoding of a message in one linguistic order into a correlate in another. A similar process may be happening in normal speech production that produces almost infinite variations upon a few basic constraints. Are there basic patterns upon which such transformations are based for any given language, therefore requiring many rules for transformation, or else are there available to the average speaker a relative large set of schematic linguistic chunks that require only slight marking or alteration to be made serviceable in speech. Evidence of oral traditions supports a hypothesis of such schematic chunking in a language. In a literate context, chunks may remain, but in smaller, more grammatically parseable units. It is also possible that a mixed kind of situation exists for most languages, with some regions of a language governed by basic paradigmatic units or rules, and others less grammatically encoded but more highly schematized. In regard to this aspect of speech production, we really do not know how language works to construct sentences that make sense.

To examine what a basic sentence is, we must see that it is foremost an explicitly defined relation, or what might be referred to as a relational statement. A sentence serves the function of marking out one particular significant relation, or related set of relations, for some functional purpose. The relation focuses upon the identity of a thing that is the main subject of the sentence. The relation marks in some way the "thingness" of the subject in some functional way. The entire structure of the sentence then can be construed as the construction of meaning by means of the relational modification of a central subject.

The most basic sentence is a one word utterance or exclamation. This is the most implicit possible form of a sentence and has the most minimal possible intrinsic structure. It consists of a useful beginning in the understanding of sentential structure because it most clearly demonstrates the importance of the background relationship to the definition of a sentence. In this regard, a "Me!" in regard to some context does not function as a normal me in any other sentence or alone as merely a sign without a symbolic referent. To say "Hey!" to someone necessitates a context in which its functional meaning can be interpreted. Such one-word sentences must be seen as contextually determined and context bound. The frequency which we might use such single word utterances in the course of conversation might, upon retrospection, defy our normal expectations of intelligibility, though we may do so without any loss of import of significance. This is in marked contrast to a basic sentence form with basic categories and basic contraints, such as "The cat sat on the mat" that is held to be relatively context independent. It is a sentence that effectively contains its own context, and does not present a problem of implicit ambiguity. We may ask "what cat" or "where on the mat" but this call for elaboration merely hedges the central significance of the statement. Yet if we modify a single word, such as "this" or "that", we bring into the sentence the problem of implicit context. Implicitness is the measure of the contextuality of a linguistic element--basicness is the measure of the codability of an element. Contextuality and codability thus are seen in a converse relation. Contextual relations are less encoded, highly coded relations are less contextual.

One-word sentences cannot be considered as the normal form of a sentence, and thus represent a special case. The minimal structure for a normal, prototypical sentence form is not one word but two, technically known as a subject and predicate or as a topic and comment. Either of these sentential categories may be replaced by a phrase, or a set of phrases, to yield highly complex sentence structures. In one-word exclamations, one or other of these is left implicit, though in normal sentential construction this is not paradigmatically appropriate. The more regular sentence structure is conventionally held to be subject, verb and object--languages vary widely in this and the range of variations come to encompass all possible permutations--SOV, VOS, SVO, OVS, OSV, and VSO. But this analysis disregards the cases of objectless sentences and the relation of the verb to the object as a part of the predicate. This has to do with transitivity/intransitivity of a basic dimension of verbs.

In other words, a key paradigmatic relation is between the subject and the predicate. The definition of both subject and predicate are secondary issues. The sentence structure may be considered prefix, infix or suffix in relation to the placement of the subject in relation to the predicate. This is important because it entails the order of modification of sentential structure that can be taken, and because this specifies the subject in relation to the relational predicate as explicit, whereas the modification of individual linguistic elements, which may follow its own prefix, infix and suffix notation, involves the relational modification of a thing or thingness. The subject then takes on a special relational value, as not the thing modified by a relation, but the thing that modifies the relation. The role and function of the object as part of the construction of the predicate is as a thing modified by the relation. What makes a sentence distinct from any other linguistic element, is that modification includes a subject-predicate relationship in which the subject, as a thing"modifies the relation, or an object of the relation.

It implies a certain informational value unlike that of things being modified or acted upon. A sentence thus constitutes a relational statement about the world, whatever the alleged truth-value that is a piece of linguistic knowledge about the world. It achieves a function of explicit symbolic relation and value. From the standpoint of human language, there is something of critical importance about this structure of relation. The precise order or nature of this relation may very with different language systems--whether topic-comment or egative-accusative or active-passive.

There is no "deep" or "universal" structure underlying this basic order of sentence patterning. Whatever is the predominant paradigm of the language will include some degree of implicit embeddedness of its structure in the language code that will facilitate recognition. Transformation rules are applied to the basic paradigm of a language for three sets of purposes: to account for and generate variable patterns of the sentence structure, to recognize and correct errors in sentence structure, and to translate from one language code to another. Transformation rules are largely implicit and remain embedded, though they guide elaboration of sentences. We employ these rules as a matter of habit and reflex, and these rules are therefore functionally encoded in our performance. They are performance rules and as such remain implicitly embedded in the construction of our sentences.

A paradigm of a language, in lieu of more definitive scientific explanation, will simply be defined as the minimal, most basic constraints that govern the formation of all sentences in a given language. These include basic rules of sentence order, punctuation, modification and marking of components. There appear to be few formalizable and universal paradigmatic constraints underlying all languages. Different languages vary considerably in their paradigmatic organization, and paradigmatic structure remains implicitly embedded in the patterning language takes. When overlaid and brought into constructive, conjunctive coordination with the basic and implicit relational field, these rules become organizationally constitutive of symbolic and relational meaning.

Transformation rules modify sentence structure in relation to the basic paradigm that remains implicitly embedded. To understand the relation of transformational rules to the basic paradigm of a language, we need to understand the relation between the implicit and explicit values at the level of the sentence, and how these are interconnected with implicitness and explicitness at the level of the linguistic element. This is roughly the difference between intrinsic implicitness/explicitness and extrinsic implicitness/explicitness, what has previously been described. Intrinsic implicitness/explicitness involves the relational and positional value of the linguistic component within the framework of the sentence. It is different from that extrinsic value derived as if the element stood alone, outside of the sentence.

Another way of looking at this is to say that the sentence creates its own context of relations that critically intercedes with the relational contexts of any of its elements. This is simply more than the intersection of contextual relations of each of its elements. The intrinsic contextuality of the sentence is based upon its fundamental relational paradigm within any given language, and the embedded and elaborated transformational rules which govern its production and articulation.

The basic paradigm remains largely implicit to the intrinsic structure of a sentence, as do the implicit transformation rules--what becomes explicitly encoded in a sentence construction is the coherence of the meta-relation described by the unique conjunction of the sentence components. In extrinsic structure, relations are implicit and thingness is rendered explicit, while in intrinsic structure, relation itself is rendered explicit, and thingness is made implicit beneath the scope of the explicit meta-relation. Bringing diverse elements within the scope of a sentence meta-relation precipitates out in increasingly explicit ways what otherwise remains implicit to the elements themselves. The conjunction of a sentence with each additional element creates diminishing degrees of implicitness, and increasingly explicit specificity of the meta-relation. Sentence construction accomplishes reduction of implicit ambiguity about the meta-relation, and explicit expressiveness about this relation at the same time. A sentence accomplishes a functional symbolic relation that is the foundation of sentience.

The intrinsic positional and associational value of a component within a sentence will determine which transformational rules will apply, at both the sentence and the elemental levels. How a component of a sentence shall be modified, and how the total structure of the sentence shall be modified, will be governed within the control structure of the basic paradigm of the language. This control structure governs the modification and selection of elements in relation to one another in the construction of sentences. Transformations are allowed within the latitude of the system, or may violate the basic rules of the paradigm, as long as the violation is marked by modification as such.

The paradigm controls and delimits the possibilities created by the intersection of the meanings of the components of a sentence construction. Elements which otherwise stand on their own, enter into a complex dialectical of mutual constraint in the sentence context in which their own range of value becomes subordinated and limited by the range of value created by the sentence as a single string. Individual elements that otherwise are entirely symbolic in function, become dispossessed of their symbolic function within the sentence context for the symbolic value of the sentence itself. The components "yield" a part of their symbolic function for the sake of the symbolic construction of meaning in the sentence. The rest of their symbolic value becomes suppressed within the symbolic scope of the sentence, and that part emphasized. The functional paradigm governing sentence construction in any language thus facilitates this basic process by imposing a minimal set of constraints upon it.

The sentence as a whole, self-contained unit, thus conveys not only explicit information about the world, but implicit information about its own structural patterning as well. A sentence becomes then, a complex element of a language with its own extrinsic relational value. The punctuation of a sentence, whether it is marked in writing by a period or a question mark, or in speaking by a pause or a rising ultimate tone, bounds the elements within that frame into a closed internal order in which the relational values of each of the components begins to rapidly work upon one another to produce some final composite, relational significance.

The elements bound within the scope of a sentence enter into a complex dialectic of mutual constraint and interpenetration of value. It is a complex calculus, and as sentences are being produced, a dynamic one, with each additional element contributing to the dialectical relations as a diminishing degree of freedom or increasing linguistic constraint in the final composition. We can speak of a sentence as a complex composition containing a net, if not quite discrete, relational value.

The paradigm of a language is founded upon the differential requirements and coordination of the functions of speaking and hearing, or writing and reading. Intrinsic structure is necessary for the purposes of unencumbered and correct speech production that will maximize either communication or expressiveness, or both, and minimize as much as possible ambiguity. The listening to the speech of others entails the application of embedded transformational rules that will automatically decode and simplify the variability of sentences within the range of the paradigm. The productive elaboration and play with words of one's own speech requires a kind of internal listening or monitoring of one's own speech activities, and a channeling of the stream of speech through the embedded transformational rules.

We are left with a sense in which the dialectic between the basic paradigm and embedded rules of transformation are mutually constraining, in the control of sentence construction. This continuum is also neatly bisected by an axis formed by the dialect between implicit and explicit structure, or what might be better referred to as virtual and possible structure versus actual and probable structure. All rules are implicit except that their instantiation forces upon them a certain functional explicitness that marks the correctness of the construction.

A sentence is a complex and dynamic construction. It is more than just a string of words or signals--the relational order of a sentence becomes a functional formula about a relation in the world. It becomes a proposition, a statement of value, whose primary significance points beyond itself to the outside world.

We are left to consider the wider, external social function of language, a consideration that necessarily involves the supra-sentential level of language construction, the "con-text" of language as discourse, and the social functionality of language in terms of its psycho-social and inter-social aspects of symbolic integration.

Language is the principle mechanism available to human beings to create and maintain social boundaries in the world. By its encoding and definition of knowledge, language also becomes the central medium for the differential distribution of the social stock of knowledge. Speaking and interaction is the principle mechanism for the maintenance of subjectively based internalizations of the culturally constructed world. Language precipitates the meanings, values and helps to solidify the socially constructed world. Language is the basis of rationality and rationalization, and is the principle means of the basic anthropological fallacies upon which the efficacy of the constructed world depends--the fallacies of abstraction, reification and reductionism. Language maintains the deceit and illusion of ideology and false consciousness. It is only by means of our language that we are capable of lying. Language is the principle means of the symbolic encoding of reality that reinforced on a secondary plane, the institutional processes of everyday life. Language is the principle means of the expression of our subjective character and interests, and for the realization of our common humanity. It is the principle means for the communication of information upon which complex social organization depends. All of these functions are central to language, and language is central to all of these functions in the social world of humankind.

We cannot every clearly separate these functions from one another in our daily discourse. Many of these are often combined in the same utterance or discursive frame. Often one or another function is superordinate in the strategic control or manipulation of language within a given context. The stylistic variation that is the main mechanism of language change is largely constrained within the scope of control of this functional hierarchy. The social success of individuals within the system is often defined by their mastery of the functionality of their language in the construction of reality. This mastery is not only rhetorical or ertistic or a matter of sophistication or refinement. But however pragmatic the strategic deployment of language, it is always poetic. Poetic mastery of one's language becomes the proof of performance, without which the doubt of one's linguistic competency would always remain. In this regard, a virtuoso performance in plain Black English can be used much more powerful effect than the best of the Queen's English.

Language is the principle mechanism for the encoding and expression of information, for the mediation, coordination and control of change in reality. We can properly speak of the legitimating function of language to reinforce humanly constructed realities. Not only does language help to legitimate our human-made constructions of reality, but is itself a principle way of constructing and of "institutionalizing" this construction as a socially shared and corporately enduring pattern.

Finally, language is the central mechanism for the integration of human reality, between internal maps and external constructions, and between the subjective sense of psychological self and the objective social world of the other. Language is an intrinsic part of our human identity and identification in the world. Not only is the world internally encoded in the brain in terms that are primarily linguistic, but human experience itself finds its principle expression and "embodiment" in the world via language. We may refer to the self-monitoring action of an "inner voice" of the mind that is the artifact of our social discourse and internalized counterpart of our spoken voice. Language defines the construction of human reality.

The question of human cognition as a sub-problem of the worldview problem concerns what can be called the psychological construction of meaning in the world. From an experiential standpoint, such meaning must be regarded as phenomenological, inherently subjective in orientation and as temporally constrained. Psychological meaning must also be considered as symbolic and functionally constructed in the world, holistically integrative, adaptive within the world, and as primarily mediated by language. Human meaning, its basic design and construction in the world, must be considered as a relational system that follows its own informal kind of logic and has its own calculus of construction.

A relational theory of meaning is based upon the idea that meaning is composed of basic minimal units, or constructs, of meaning which are encoded in the brain, which are used in the complex and systematic construction of reality, and which underlie the systematic organization of Mind. These minimal units of meaning are called mememes and they are psychologically organized into a sophisticated "mimetic system" of meaning that depends upon and incorporates the inherent linguistic system. Mememes can be considered as the rudimentary constructs of human experience, constructs that representationally frame our selective perception of the world. As such, mememes relationally indelibly fuse semantic "value" with the very act of experience and perception itself. Mememes are preceptual in that they underlie and compose the more complex mental-cognitive constructions that we refer to as concepts and conception. The mimetic system has, as one of its principle organic functions, the organization and processing of human memory and meaning associations.

It must be reiterated that mememes themselves are basic constructs of cognition. They are thus emblematic and are by definition composed of several sorts of perceptual stimuli. As sign-symbols they are schematic bits and pieces of experience which we compose together to create "chunks" of knowledge about the world.

Mememes therefore encode three kinds of coordinate information-- relational thingness, relational rules, and relational values. Each is a separate sign/signal that performs a distinct function in the integration of experience, in two forms, at the complex level of the systemic mind, and at the basic level of the neuronal and biochemical organization of the brain. These memes constitute basic symbols, as well as the basic components of more complex symbols.

The psychological construction of reality is based upon the integration of several coordinate systems of the brain to produce what can be called the systemic control hierarchy of the mind. The overarching product of this hierarchy is a sense of self incumbent with psychological "ego-identity" in the world, and which accompanies the identification in the world. We internalize parts, pieces and people of the world as if a corporate part of our own psychological, subjective identity, and we externalize our own organic identity in the world, such that the world comes to symbolically, psychologically embody our own internal experiences.

We can refer to gestalts as discrete states and frames of mind or consciousness. The constraint of temporaneousness upon our phenomenological flow or stream of consciousness is based upon the focal momentary limits of our attention and short-term memory. We can attend to only a small set and focal area at any one moment. Consciousness is integrated by the synthesizing of a series of discrete frames of attention that are punctuated by transitions. The effect of the mind is to block out such transitions from our awareness, and to create a coherent and consistent pattern of awareness which encompass more than we are able to attend to at any one moment.

The identity of experience is the familiarity of pattern of our everyday phenomenal existence that is coordinate without representational understandings and comprehension of our world. Identity of experience is achieved by the sense of unification of experience in gestalt pattern recognition and by the disambiguation of discrepant patterns.

A consequence of this when coupled the symbolic nature of our identity of experience, is that we are able to entertain several possible versions of reality outside of our immediate awareness. Much of our attention is guided by the ability to fuse several alternative versions together to create a composite image free of the discrepancy of transition. Mental illness and hallucination is a clear example of this process of conscious fusion, in which case it amounts to an intrinsic psychotic confusion because it is no longer functionally ordered or constrained in relation to an external world.

We may in this regard appropriately refer to what may be termed the control structure of human consciousness, one which is functionally, strategically oriented in relation to the external world. This control is accomplished by a complex and dynamic coordination of the various systems of the brain under the systemic hierarchy of the mind. The analogy of this function is of a common blackboard that the several systems asynchronously access. It frames problems functionally defined, and prioritizes them in relation to their functional importance. This is part of the interpretive function of the mind that is tied up with the problem of maintaining an integration and identity based upon a dynamic equilibrium with the outside world. The mediation of change is the most important aspect of this function, and in this regard we refer to the intrinsic "power" of psychological knowledge and control.

It is critical to understand that culture is primarily shared, that it is expressed and structured symbolically through our knowledge, our actions and our artifacts, and that it is articulated and integrated primarily by means of our language. Sharing is both in a common external context, and in terms of shared linguistic, cognitive and psychological patterns. Cultural patterning is thus complexly organized and takes on the same gestalt characteristics as are found in language and cognitive response patterning.

To a great extent, culture becomes unconsciously embedded in the background experience of our everyday lives. It is therefore largely taken for granted and treated as if natural to our reality. It is thus largely transparent to our own objective awareness and normally invisible to our own apperceptive apprehension.

In this regard the boundary is principally "symbolic" in the more conventional meaning of the term. All symbols have some material referent or substantial significance in the world. When we refer to the cultural construction of reality, we refer to the symbolic construction of the world as a meaningful place built around a central sense of identity. We can refer to several other systems of symbolization besides our version of worldview that allow for the holistic integration of our experience of the world, and that serve to bound our view of the world in significant ways--mythology, common sense, ideology, philosophy, art, science and religion.

Culture as a sense of boundary comes to clear focus when we consider the cultural boundedness of our own worldview, boundaries that normally remain invisible in their embeddedness in our world, until we come into direct confrontation with basic cultural differences that tend to relativize and make apparent the facticity of our own boundaries. We are left with a non-absolute notion of the relativity of values and views, of a fundamental normative relativity defined within the arc of human variation. We find anthropological abnormality in functional terms of the transitions and discrepancies that undermine our boundaries and conceptions of normality, and that tend to disintegrate our sense of symbolic unity and totality.

When we refer to the concept of culture, we must also take into account the inherent sociality of human experience. Humankind is by definition a social animal in a socially constructed world. In this regard, it is clear that we should speak of social construction versus social structure" and thereby highlight the processural aspects of human performance and practice that this entails. Social relations exist in the world as part of a range of interpersonal transactions that involve some form of symbolically mediated reciprocity that concern the distribution of people in relation to vital resources in the world. Such relations are always relative and tend toward uneven distribution. Asymmetry in human social relations arises as the result of their manipulation and the institutionalization of uneven social relations. We thus come to find ourselves predominantly constrained and defined by our social positionality in the world. Not only is our worldview likely to be in large measure a function of our own culturally relative biases, but also of our own particular, socially-relative, point of view.

This kind of social relativity of our worldview has not yet been taken fully into account in terms of the world view problem, though we can understand the relationships between psychological identity, linguistic power and stylistic variations which underlie language change, the legitimating functions of institutionalized systems of symbolization such as mythology and ideology, and our socially constrained sense of proportion and perspective about the world.

The cultural boundaries which exist in the world are defined by the boundaries that we are born and raised with, and that, as adults, we continue to impose upon our world.

We are left with a paradoxical sense of the worldview problem. We attribute diverse forms of relativity to the central fact of the inherent holistic integration of human worldview, by which people come to construct and construe their worlds in fundamentally different ways. It is because of this integration and its complexity that we cannot clearly separate the roles of language, culture or cognition. We make these analytical distinctions purely for heuristic and ertistic convenience, but we must see them as inextricably bound up one within the other. Though language is clearly at the center of the nexus of relationships, it is also itself as determined by culture and cognition as it may be determinative of them. And yet, the paradox arises when we consider that this holistic integration which accounts for the range of relativity of worldview and for the lack of absolute or a priori knowledge, is itself based upon certain universal principles which account for the integration of reality. Though the results of integration are historically distinct and different in each case, the underlying conditions and constraints accounting for these differences are the same.

Though our worldview is holistically integrated and functionally adapted, it is not ever completely so. The fact to render it complete leads to the superimposition of basic symbolic fallacies upon our experience of reality that have their own maladaptive consequences. In relation to worldview. I am arguing for a reality orientation. We are, by virtue of our unfinished nature and our acquisitive dependency upon culture, defined anthropologically by our world openness. We can account for this fact that our constructions of reality must be functionally adaptive in an ever changing world, and thus no fixed system of constraint will suffice for long to sustain our sense of order about the world or of our relation with it. This anthropological openness which characterizes our language, cognition and culture, has been both a vice and a virtue. It is a source of both the symbolic ambiguity and symbolic unity by which we experience the world in a dialectical manner.

A great deal more will be gained than lost by amending our views about absolute and universal Structures that underlie determine all things in our world, to think about how we have constructed our world, and the functional principles and relational patterns which underlie the processes of our construction of reality. The fact of this fundamental paradox of worldview, that we can have a world that is both relative and universal, itself lies upon the inherent antinomial structure and identity of the human symbol--for the capacity of the symbol to incorporate contradiction and find identity in difference. We end up with a different kind of symbolic structure underlying our vision of the world than the kind many of us would want to superimpose, we end up with the sort of dialectical contradiction in the symbolic totalization of reality with which Claude Levi-Strauss dealt so well.